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.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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