The Presidential Office yesterday announced the list of 15 candidates who President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) will nominate to serve as new members of the Council of Grand Justices.
The list of nominees includes three women which the government says shows the value its places on women's rights.
The president also nominated the incumbent Judicial Yuan President Weng Yueh-sheng (
Presidential Office Secretary-General Chiou I-jen (
"The Presidential Office will present the nominees to the Legislative Yuan in late May in order to get the legislators' consent," Chiou said.
The main mission of the Council of Grand Justices, whose term in office is eight years, is interpreting the Constitution and unifying the interpretation of laws and ordinances.
Fifteen new grand justices are scheduled to take office in October.
Only three incumbent grand justices have been nominated by Chen, including Lin Young-mou (
The three women candidates are Supreme Court judge Hsu Pi-hu (
According to constitutional ammendments passed in 2000, the Judicial Yuan shall have 15 grand justices, of which one is the president and another is the vice president of the Judicial Yuan.
The KMT-PFP alliance in the Legislative Yuan announced yesterday that it would approve only 10 of the nominees on the list, saying that the others are pro-DPP and are therefore not qualified because they cannot be impartial and objective.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide