In what was seen as a move to allay US concerns over President Chen Shui-bian's (
If approved by the legislature, the electorate will also enjoy the right to have the final say on any changes to the nation's territorial boundaries.
The Executive Yuan is scheduled to approve the draft amendments during its weekly Cabinet meeting today and hopes to have the draft pass the legislature before the last legislative session on Jan. 21.
In December, the Executive Yuan withdrew draft amendments to the Referendum Law from its weekly agenda in the run-up to the legislative election after the US government expressed trepidation over Chen's plans to rewrite the Constitution.
According to Cabinet Spokesman Chen Chi-mai (
"The procedure of constitutional overhaul should be regulated by the Constitution, not by the Referendum Law," he said. Chen also dismissed media speculation that the legal revisions were made to counter China's "anti-secession law."
"The amendments are being made to regulate the exercise of people's democratic rights, and have nothing to do with political ideology or Taiwan's independence," he said.
The draft the Cabinet intends to discuss today would lower the threshold of required signatories of a petition for a national referendum to 0.05 percent of eligible voters, or about 8,000 people. The law currently stipulates that a successful referendum petition needs 0.5 percent of eligible voters -- about 80,000 people.
The law also requires that signatures of 5 percent of the number of voters who took part in the most recent presidential election, or approximately 800,000 people, are needed before a petition for a national referendum can be screened by the Referendum Review Committee.
The Executive Yuan hopes to lower this figure to 2 percent, or about 300,000 voters, to petition for a national referendum. The government is also seeking to abolish the Referendum Review Committee (
As the Executive Yuan is in charge of national referendums, the government is proposing to allow the Central Election Commission (CEC) and its branch offices to handle national referendum affairs.
While the government is prohibited from proposing or commissioning a referendum, except on the statutory grounds stipulated in the law, the Cabinet is seeking to obtain the power to do so.
The draft proposes that the Executive Yuan would have the right to ask the CEC to initiate a referendum, pending the approval of the legislature.
The Executive Yuan also proposes nullifying the article that prevents people from initiating more than one referendum on the same topic within three years if initial referendum fails to win the support of the public.
Wu Chien-kuo (吳建國), director of the Association of Promoting a Referendum on the No. 4 Nuclear Power Plant, said that the threshold for the number of required signatures on a petition proposed by the Executive Yuan is still too high.
"Basically, we thought the number of people required to file for a petition for a national referendum and a constitutional amendment should not exceed 100, and the number of required signatures should not be more than 1.5 percent of the number of voters that take part in the latest presidential election," he said.
The high thresholds subsequently increase the cost of the initiation of a referendum, Wu said, and the printing and stationery expenses for a national referendum is estimated to cost between NT$60 million and NT$80 million.
"Except for a political party, I don't think any individual or private organization can afford to call a referendum because of such high costs," he said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods