The Executive Yuan yesterday finalized a draft political archives act to declassify political files held by government agencies, political parties and affiliates that have been classified for at least 30 years.
The draft act is to complement the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例), which was passed in December last year and was designed to facilitate efforts to uncover the truth about the nation’s authoritarian era and promote transitional justice.
The proposal specifies rules to cover the transfer of political data to the government, the uses of such data and the extent to which such data are to be disclosed.
Photo: Screengrab from President Tsai Ing-wen’s Facebook page
The National Development Council (NDC) would be in charge of collating, preserving and publicizing political files dating from Aug. 15, 1945, to Nov. 6, 1992, that are linked to the 228 Incident, the Martial Law era and the Period of National Mobilization against Communist Rebellion.
The draft states that political parties, their affiliates and businesses they operate that are in possession of political files determined by the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee to be state-owned should transfer the files to the National Archives Administration (NAA) within a prescribed period.
Files deemed by the NAA to serve the educational, research or exhibition purposes are to be used by the Ministry of Culture and relevant agencies, the draft states.
The bill also stipulates that government agencies should identify all the political files in their possession and deliver them to the NAA within six months of the act’s promulgation. The time frame could be extended if agencies cannot fulfill the requirement, but not exceeding a year.
However, files at government agencies designated “permanently classified” under the Classified National Security Information Protection Act (國家機密保護法) would be exempted from being transferred to the NAA.
The NAA should regularly review which files should be made available to the public and files that have been classified for at least 30 years should be unconditionally declassified, it states.
People arrested, investigated, prosecuted, warranted, tried or penalized for being implicated in events documented in files would be able to view, copy or make photocopies of files related to themselves, or their survivors could exercise the right in their stead.
The bill also states that the real names of whistle-blowers, witnesses, sources and civil servants implicated in a political event are to be made available for public viewing alongside the codes, code names and pseudonyms assigned to them.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) criticized the bill, saying the legislation would become a weapon for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to crucify the KMT, as it would give the DPP carte blanche to comb through the KMT’s archives.
However, NDC Deputy Minister Tseng Hsu-cheng (曾旭正) told a news conference at the Executive Yuan that the bill was not politically motivated.
The council had proposed the legislation to facilitate what it expected to be a lengthy task of collating such political files.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS