The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislative caucus yesterday said that it will request that the legislature hold a provisional session to review the arms-procurement package and other bills if they fail to pass before the current session ends at the end of this month.
"We will make the proposition, but we'd prefer to see the legislature pass them during the current session," DPP caucus whip Lai Ching-te (賴清德) said. "I'm calling on the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] caucus to re-open the door for negotiation, because what it is doing now is bound to further sabotage the already tarnished image of the legislature."
While lawmakers are supposed to dedicate themselves to reviewing and passing as many bills as possible during regular legislative sessions, Lai said, they are instead waiting until the final day or until extended or extraordinary sessions.
If an interim session is called, Lai said he would like it to start as soon as possible, preferably the beginning of July.
The legislature is scheduled to go into recess on May 31, while the newly elected National Assembly will convene on June 1.
The final date and duration of the provisional session, however, will have to be hammered out in cross-party negotiations.
The KMT caucus halted cross-party talks last month to protest an investigation into KMT Vice Chairman Chiang Pin-kun's (
The Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) caucus has also announced that it will withdraw from cross-party talks in protest at President Chen Shui-bian's (
While the arms-procurement plan has continued to be blocked by the opposition-dominated Procedure Committee since the legislature convened in February, Lai said that the DPP caucus would like to see the special bill and special budget as well as other priority bills clear the legislature during the provisional session.
Other bills include the confirmation of Chen's nominations for the Control Yuan, amendments to the Organic Law of the Executive Yuan (
Lai was responding to comments made earlier yesterday by Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
Wang said that the DPP caucus had to file a request for a special legislative session if the government felt it necessary to do so.
"While I have previously proposed to hold an extraordinary session to deal with such important bills as the arms-procurement plan, it is up to individual caucuses to decide whether they will accept the proposal," he said. "It is the precedent of the legislature that the party feeling the need to hold a provisional session makes the proposition."
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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