The student demonstrators of the Wild Strawberry Student Movement yesterday urged the government to initiate investigations and explain to the public the alleged use of excessive force by police against protesters during the visit of a top Chinese envoy last week.
In an on-line statement on the students’ Web blog (action1106.blogspot.com) yesterday, the students urged the government to explain to the public specifically which law authorized the police to prevent people from waving Taiwan’s national flag, but allowed people to hold China’s national flag during demonstrations for and against the visit by Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) last week.
The students also urged the government to clarify to the public whether all police officers involved in the security measures last week carried out their duties in accordance with normal administrative procedures and urged the authorities to reflect on whether their measures had been excessive.
PHOTO: CNA
The students have been staging silent sit-ins nationwide, protesting what they call excessive police force during Chen’s five-day stay.
They are demanding an apology from President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) and the resignation of National Police Agency Director-General Wang Cho-chun (王卓鈞) and National Security Bureau Director-General Tsai Chao-ming (蔡朝明).
Also on the students’ agenda is an immediate amendment to the Assembly and Parade Law (集會遊行法), which currently obliges event organizers to gain police approval before holding rallies.
On their Web blog, the students have included numerous hyperlinks to video clips showing police security measures last week, including one that showed a plainclothes police officer telling a person videotaping the protest at Zhongshan Bridge to immediately leave “or I will ask a member of the Special Weapons And Tactics [SWAT] team to arrest you.”
“We can see that the law enforcement authorities assigned police officers a mission to complete and that police officers would rather excessively limit or even violate people’s basic human rights in a bid to save their own jobs,” the student protesters’ statement said, adding that the police had violated people’s constitutional rights by resorting to force against those who did not pose an obvious and immediate threat to Chen.
The students also shrugged off Ma’s comments on Wednesday that excessive use of police force had only occurred in isolated cases.
“These illegal and unconstitutional incidents and violations of human rights took place because the government expanded the scale of law enforcement during Chen’s stay in Taiwan,” student movement spokesman Lee Li-wei (李立偉) said.
Meanwhile, Lee called on teachers and students who supported the movement to gather and broaden the scale of the sit-in at Liberty Square, outside the Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall tomorrow.
Lee said about 50 students from Hong Kong Polytechnic University would launch a sit-in at their school in support of the movement today.
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck off the coast of Hualien County in eastern Taiwan at 7pm yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The epicenter of the temblor was at sea, about 69.9km south of Hualien County Hall, at a depth of 30.9km, it said. There were no immediate reports of damage resulting from the quake. The earthquake’s intensity, which gauges the actual effect of a temblor, was highest in Taitung County’s Changbin Township (長濱), where it measured 5 on Taiwan’s seven-tier intensity scale. The quake also measured an intensity of 4 in Hualien, Nantou, Chiayi, Yunlin, Changhua and Miaoli counties, as well as
Taiwan is to have nine extended holidays next year, led by a nine-day Lunar New Year break, the Cabinet announced yesterday. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday next year matches the length of this year’s holiday, which featured six extended holidays. The increase in extended holidays is due to the Act on the Implementation of Commemorative and Festival Holidays (紀念日及節日實施條例), which was passed early last month with support from the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party. Under the new act, the day before Lunar New Year’s Eve is also a national holiday, and Labor Day would no longer be limited
The first tropical storm of the year in the western North Pacific, Wutip (蝴蝶), has formed over the South China Sea and is expected to move toward Hainan Island off southern China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. The agency said a tropical depression over waters near the Paracel and Zhongsha islands strengthened into a tropical storm this morning. The storm had maximum sustained winds near its center of 64.8kph, with peak gusts reaching 90kph, it said. Winds at Beaufort scale level 7 — ranging from 50kph to 61.5kph — extended up to 80km from the center, it added. Forecaster Kuan Hsin-ping
COMMITMENTS: The company had a relatively low renewable ratio at 56 percent and did not have any goal to achieve 100 percent renewable energy, the report said Pegatron Corp ranked the lowest among five major final assembly suppliers in progressing toward Apple Inc’s commitment to be 100 percent carbon neutral by 2030, a Greenpeace East Asia report said yesterday. While Apple has set the goal of using 100 percent renewable energy across its entire business, supply chain and product lifecycle by 2030, carbon emissions from electronics manufacturing are rising globally due to increased energy consumption, it said. Given that carbon emissions from its supply chain accounted for more than half of its total emissions last year, Greenpeace East Asia evaluated the green transition performance of Apple’s five largest final
RSS