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CEC powers on citizenship issue limited

The Central Election Commission (CEC) said yesterday it was not authorized to deal with incumbent lawmakers who hold dual citizenship in the legislature and it has yet to decide what to do with those who possessed dual citizenship in previous legislatures.

The meeting comes in the wake of questions over the citizenship status of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Diane Lee (李慶安) and former Taiwan Solidarity Union legislator George Liu (劉寬平), who is now the nation’s representative to Switzerland.

The Chinese-language Next Magazine claimed in March that Lee still holds US citizenship.

Last month the magazine reported that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) had received confirmation from the US government that Lee holds US citizenship. Lee has denied both reports while the ministry said it had never asked the US government to verify Lee’s citizenship status.

Liu — who took up his post in Switzerland in February — said earlier this month that he had filed an application to relinquish his US citizenship at the end of last year but the process was not yet complete.

That raised the question of whether he had violated the Nationality Act (國籍法) by serving as a legislator from 2005 to this year while still a US citizen.

Article 20 of the Nationality Act, which took effect on June 20, 2001, stipulates that foreign citizens are prohibited from holding government office.

While the legislature has launched its own investigation into the foreign citizenship or residency status of lawmakers, the commission met for three hours yesterday to discuss how it would handle the issues. But no conclusion was reached.

“There was an article in the Election and Recall Law of Public Servants (公職人員選舉罷免法) that stipulated the Central Election Commission could handle cases where legislators or legislators-elect held dual nationality — but the article was removed last November,” commission Chairman Chang Cheng-hsiung (張政雄) told reporters after the meeting.

That means the commission is not empowered to deal with the nationality issue in the current legislature, he said.

“We did decide in the meeting that we do have the authority to deal with dual citizenship cases if they occurred between 2000 to 2008 [when the article was still in effect], but we did not reach a consensus on how to do so,” he said.

Chang said the commission could either invalidate a legislator’s election or revoke their position, but “commission members have differed on which measure to take.”

He said the commission members did not discuss individual cases yesterday, which were “left until the next meeting.”
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