Law enforcement officials yesterday said the establishment of a national fingerprint database would enhance domestic security. but local activist groups and several lawmakers said that the idea would violate both human rights and the Constitution.
"Most police hope that Taiwan can build a fingerprint database to cope with more complicated and difficult crimes they face today," Chen Chia-chin (陳家欽), director of Kaohsiung City Police Department's Criminal Investigation Corps told the Taipei Times yesterday.
"A citizen fingerprint database would be helpful when searching for illegal immigrants, laborers and criminals. People's fingerprints on record could help swiftly identify a dead body or a suspect if they have left fingerprints at the scene of a crime," Chen said.
Chen also said closer cross-strait exchange has raised security concerns as more illegal Chinese immigrants commit crimes in Taiwan. In addition, a number of kidnapping cases demonstrated recently that cross-strait criminal groups are increasingly active in the country.
A fingerprint database could help block illegal Chinese immigrants and criminals from entering Taiwan.
"That is an emergency in domestic security," Chen said.
Chen said unresolved criminal cases, such as the murder of Peng Wan-ju (彭婉如), director of the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) department of women's affairs, who was raped and killed in Kaohsiung in 1996, or the shooting death of Taoyuan County Magistrate Liu Pang-you (劉邦友) also in 1996, demonstrated the need to create a national fingerprint database.
He said on both cases, police found a number of fingerprints at the crime scene, but because there is no fingerprint file, the cases remain unsolved.
In addition, Chen said a high-ranking police official's daughter was raped and murdered a decade ago. Police investigating that case also found fingerprints, but it took almost eight years to identify and arrest the suspect.
Chen also recalled a case were a national fingerprint database might of been useful. He said a female college student surnamed Lin was raped and murdered in Pingtung County in the early 1990s. Police found fingerprints at the scene of the crime, but were unable to identify the perpetrator. However, when the suspect joined the military service and provided his fingerprint three years after the crime, police swiftly solved the case.
A Criminal Investigation Bureau official who requested anonymity said fingerprint evidence has helped police to solve some of the nation's highest profile criminal cases.
The official also said the "gas bomber" Kao Pao-chung (高寶中) was identified only as a result of the fingerprints he left on a plastic bag. Kao blew up a gas-laden van near Taipei Railway Station in the run-up to last year's legislative elections.
But the case for collecting every citizen's fingerprints suffered a setback last week, when the Council of Grand Justices ruled on June 10 that it was unconstitutional for the government to collect citizens' fingerprints for the new national ID cards. The government originally required applicants to provide fingerprints when applying for the new national ID cards, due to be issued starting July 1.
Some DPP members and civil rights groups slammed the plan as a violation of human rights.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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