The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday amended its charter to exempt certain high-ranking government officials from serving in party positions, while amending the party’s Regulations on Clean Politics to penalize party members who fail to avoid conflicts of interest.
“The public might not know why we are holding an irregula national congress to revise our party charter,” president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said.
“According to the DPP’s original charter, certain government officials are also required to serve as the party’s Central Standing Committee [CSC] members,” she said. “Such a rule was meaningful in the past, but we must reform it under the current situation.”
Photo: CNA
Tsai said that the DPP would look for talented people across party lines who share similar ideologies with the DPP to serve in the new government.
For instance, vice president-elect Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) and premier-designate Lin Chuan (林全) are not DPP members, Tsai said.
The revisions also show the DPP’s determination to promote neutrality of government officials, Tsai said.
Photo: CNA
“Exempting officials from having to also serve as the party’s CSC members would turn the relationship between officials and the DPP into a partnership, instead of a supervisor-to-subordinate relationship,” Tsai said. “They report to the people of Taiwan, not to the CSC, and that is why today’s [yesterday’s] party charter revisions are important.”
The original charter stipulates that party members serving as vice president, Presidential Office secretary-general and deputy secretary-general, Cabinet ministers and deputy ministers, as well as several other central government positions, must be party delegates, while DPP members serving as vice-president, premier and Presidential Office secretary-general are mandatorily CSC members under a DPP administration.
The article giving the president the option of doubling as the DPP chairperson remained unchanged.
The party charter was also amended to allow local government heads affiliated with the DPP, as well as legislative caucus officials, to serve as CSC or Central Executive Committee members, since they are elected by popular vote and represent their constituencies.
Meanwhile, the congress also amended the Regulations on Clean Politics to authorize the party’s Clean Politics Committee to penalize party members who fail to avoid conflicts of interest.
As the regulation was amended after the controversial purchase and sales of OBI Pharma Co (台灣浩鼎) shares owned by Academia Sinica president Wong Chi-huey’s (翁啟惠) daughter, the clause has been called “the Wong Chi-huey clause.”
However, Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦) denied that the amendment had anything to do with Wong, as he is not a DPP member.
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
MORE RESPONSIBILITY: Draftees would be expected to fight alongside professional soldiers, likely requiring the transformation of some training brigades into combat units The armed forces are to start incorporating new conscripts into combined arms brigades this year to enhance combat readiness, the Executive Yuan’s latest policy report said. The new policy would affect Taiwanese men entering the military for their compulsory service, which was extended to one year under reforms by then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2022. The conscripts would be trained to operate machine guns, uncrewed aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided missile launchers and Stinger air defense systems, the report said, adding that the basic training would be lengthened to eight weeks. After basic training, conscripts would be sorted into infantry battalions that would take
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
RSS