A majority of people responding to a recent opinion poll have singled out the legislature as the most corrupt agency in the country, according to the results of a survey released by the Transparency International's Taiwan chapter.
The poll was part of a global survey released by the Berlin-based anti-graft group Transparency International (TI) on the UN's Anti-Corruption Day on Friday.
Up to 78 percent of those responding to the survey said they feel that the Legislative Yuan is most corrupt, and 69 percent said political parties are corrupt. The least corrupt institutions cited by local respondents are religious groups, non government organizations and household registration agencies. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they believe that corruption will increase over the next three years.
According to TI's 2005 Global Barometer survey, corruption is on the increase in most countries and poor people are often the hardest hit.
Nearly 55,000 people in 69 countries were surveyed for the Corruption Barometer as part of a Gallup poll conducted between May and October.
The poll found that a majority of people in 48 out of 69 countries surveyed thought the problem had worsened over the past three years.
"Today's survey shows that people believe corruption is deeply embedded in their countries, " TI Chairwoman Huguette Labelle said. "When a poor young mother believes that her government places its own interests above her child's, or that securing services like that child's basic health requires a hand under the table, her hope for the future is dampened," she said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift