People wishing to obtain a copy of their household registration record would be able to file a request via the Internet under amendments to the Household Registration Law (
Applicants now have to file the request in writing or show up at the counter of the household registration office for their domicile of origin.
If approved by the legislature, the law would also allow applicants to request other household-related documents at the household registration office nearest their current residence instead of their domicile of origin.
According to Cabinet Spokesman Lin Chia-lung (
"It seeks to make the application process for household registrations more convenient and government services more electronically oriented and efficient," Lin said.
A Cabinet official who asked not to be named said that household registration offices would be barred from handling certain matters for applicants filing requests outside of their domicile of origin.
These include birth registrations, relocation registrations, the issuance of national identity cards, registration and certification of personal seals and certification, registration and alteration of address plates and administrative zoning.
The last attempt to revamp the Household Registration Law drew vitriolic criticism from the Cabinet, legislature and human rights groups.
Amid calls from the Ministry of Justice to establish a national fingerprint bank, the Ministry of the Interior had planned to establish an index-fingerprint database to prevent ID-card forgery.
Believing such an archive would violate human rights and privacy, the Cabinet in May last year rejected an article in the amendments that would have required every citizen over the age of 14 to provide their fingerprints when issued with photo ID cards.
The Cabinet rejected the idea of a fingerprint database again in August last year.
Lawmakers, however, submit-ted the proposal to the legislature, where it passed its first reading in May this year.
The idea of establishing a national fingerprint databank was first raised in a 1997 amendment to the Household Registration Law. It was dropped because human rights groups lobbied against it.
The arrest in August last year of two suspects in the murder of former Hsinhu Elementary School teacher Wu Hsiao-hui (
Some law enforcement officers and lawmakers have argued that since it took the police eight years to make a breakthrough in the Wu case, human rights might actually be better protected if there was a national fingerprint database.
In the wake of difficulties in identifying victims of the crash of a China Airlines jetliner in May last year, the justice ministry revived the issue, saying that the database was necessary.
The ministry's proposal prompted Premier Yu Shyi-kun to ask the Ministry of the Interior to re-evaluate the idea.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: