Minister of the Interior Lee Yi-yang (
Lee made the comments during a question-and-answer session at the legislature's Home and Nations Committee meeting yesterday after Taipei County Commissioner Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋) on Sunday released an order promoting 140 local police officers.
However, National Police Agency (NPA) officials responded on Monday by calling the promotion order invalid and said that the power to promote police officers lay in the hands of the agency, not the county government.
The central and county governments have been battling each other over the issue for the past few days.
"According to the Statute Governing Police Personnel Affairs [警察人事條例], the Ministry of the Interior has the power to handle personnel matters concerning the police," Lee said when asked by Taiwan Solidarity Union Legislator David Huang (黃適卓) to comment on the recent controversy.
"Although the ministry may defer the power to special administrative cities, Taipei County is not a full special municipality, and we have never deferred the power to them," Lee said. "Therefore, Chou's [promotion] order is completely invalid."
Taipei County was upgraded to a quasi-special municipality at the beginning of this month, and thus is entitled to certain rights normallly reserved for special municipalities.
A special municipality is a city under direct Cabinet control with "a population of more than 1.5 million" and has "special needs in political, economic, cultural and urban development" according to the Municipal Self-Governance Act (
Taipei and Kaohsiung cities are the only two special administrative cities.
On the other, hand, Chou insisted that Taipei County enjoyed all of the rights of a full special municipality.
"Does the minister of the interior really understand the law?" Chou said when he visited Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
"Taipei County enjoys the same rights as Taipei and Kao-hsiung cities after amendments to the Local Government Act [
He said that all 140 police officers would be promoted as announced and would receive the corresponding salary increases.
When asked for comment, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Kuo Su-chun (
Kuo said the speaker believed Taipei County's status upgrade would be meaningless if it could not enjoy the full rights of other special municipalities.
In response to Chou's comments, the ministry issued a statement last night and said Chou has misinterpreted the laws.
"A quasi-special municipality is not a special municipality, hence it certainly does not enjoy the same rights as a full special municipality" the statement said.
Lee further elaborated that, according to the Local Government Act, a quasi-special municipality is only entitled to enjoy the same administrative organization and budget.
"The power to handle police personnel matters is certainly not included," Lee said in the statement.
Additional reporting by Flora Wang
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS