More than 24,000 cases have piled up at the office of the Control Yuan, which has not been operating since Feb. 1, 2005 because of the KMT-controlled legislature's refusal to endorse President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) nominees for seats in the Taiwan's top watchdog body.
Control Yuan administrative staffers said that 40,000-plus cases were filed between February 2005 and last month, including petitions from citizens, public functionaries' assets disclosure reports and cases involving conflicts of interest and political contributions.
Some of the cases have been addressed in accordance with a package of measures approved by former Control Yuan president Fredrick Chien (
Over the past two years, a Control Yuan administrator said, a spate of high-profile scandals and irregularities have caused widespread concern about official corruption and a deterioration of business ethics.
Those cases include sales of pork products from sick and dead hogs, illegal money lending, leaks of confidential personnel data in the military, controversies surrounding the Kaohsiung mass rapid transit construction project, insider trading, prosecutorial coverup of drug trafficking and ethical problems involving judicial personnel.
With no Control Yuan members to probe whether government officials should be held responsible for dereliction of duty or legal violations, the Control Yuan administrator said, trust in the government has been affected.
Moreover, the official said, 67 cases involving censure or punishment of individual government employees will remain unheard until Control Yuan members are appointed.
"Any delay in finalizing probes into those cases is unfair to all those involved," he added.
The absence of Control Yuan members has had the more serious result of preventing action on suspected infractions in assets disclosure reports by public office holders and irregularities in political donations, the official said.
The inaction is like offering "a legal break" to those who violate various "sunshine laws" designed to promote clean politics, he said.
The official also lamented the large backlog of petitions filed by individual citizens over alleged infringements of human rights or personal property rights.
Noting that the International Ombudsman Institute (IOI) is one of the few international organizations that Taiwan has been admitted to under its official title -- the Republic of China, the official said that Taiwan has missed three IOI meetings over the past two years because of the absence of Control Yuan members.
The official said that China has repeatedly tried, although in vain, to have Taiwan expelled from the organization.
Chen has agreed to draw up a new list of nominees for the Control Yuan seats and has asked various political parties to recommend qualified candidates.
Nevertheless, the Chinese Nationalist Party and the People First Party have given only a lukewarm response to Chen's call.
With no signs of reconciliation between the ruling and opposition parties in sight, it remains unclear when the Control Yuan will resume normal operations.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the