Complaining the judiciary was partisan, the People First Party (PFP) legislative caucus yesterday proposed to amend the Organic Law of the Judicial Yuan (司法院組織法) to allow the State Public Prosecutor-General to assign an independent prosecutor or task force to handle major cases.
The amendment would require that candidates for the post of prosecutor-general be nominated by the president and approved by the Legislative Yuan. Appointees would be restricted to one five-year term.
The PFP caucus claimed that more than 500 prosecutors had signed a petition demanding that an independent prosecutorial system be established.
"The government has wrongly given priority to several cases. The important and urgent cases are not speedily dealt with, yet the minor cases are getting immediate attention," PFP Legislator Pang Chien-kuo (龐建國) said.
"We must ask whether prosecutors are coming under pressure -- so their neutrality is questionable. It is urgent that we establish an independent prosecutorial system," Pang said.
PFP Legislator Chou Hsi-wei (
"While [PFP Legislator] Chiu Yi's (邱毅) case was expedited, former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) was still only summoned as a witness in the National Security Bureau case. This shows that the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] administration is protecting its supporters and suppressing its opponents," Chou said.
PFP Legislator Liu Wen-hsiung (
"The DPP government has been prosecuting pan-blue supporters, even film stars Brigitte Lin (
Liu said the PFP's feeling that political prosecutions were taking place emerged after PFP legislators Feng Ting-kuo (
Liu said that Feng and Lee Ching-hua visited Central Election Commission Chairman Huang Shih-cheng (
Liu said they had done so only to suggest the commission had made the announcement illegally and that they were entitled to make the suggestion at the commission's premises.
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
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