Students' rights to participate in politics should be recognized in the revised Constitution, a group of young adults said yesterday.
The youth representatives made their suggestion in a meeting with Presidential General-Secretary Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), who is seeking public input on President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) plan to re-engineer the Constitution.
Wang Wei-chung (
"The nation's constitutional reforms should include students' right to participate in politics," said Wang.
"Students' rights to take part in politics has already been accepted around the world," he said. "Why does Taiwan still stipulate that students cannot run for election?"
Lin said "it is very bizarre" to not have student representatives in the legislative body or taking part in amending the Constitution.
The leader of the Association Promoting High School Students' Rights, Lin Po-yi (
The current Constitution stipulates that only those 20 and older may vote.
However, Wang Li-bun (
He said that young adults' contributions to society and to the gross national product should also be taken into consideration in discussions on dropping the nation's universal suffrage age.
Lawyer Lai Chung-chian (
Su said that he will forward the various opinions to the constitutional reform committee to be formed in the near future.
Reiterating the president's remarks that constitutional reform is not the exclusive preserve of one party nor of one individual, Su stressed that he will work to encompass a broader scope of groups to solicit their opinions on constitutional reform and thus form a consensus on the matter.
Among the groups and individuals whom Su has thus far consulted include academics, wom-en's rights activists, the Association of Taiwan Journalists and senior presidential advisor and human rights writer Bo Yang (
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:
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