A group of 110 Tibetans in exile in this country without legal status may soon be granted temporary residency, Mongolian and Tibetans Affairs Commission (MTAC) Secretary-General Chien Shih-yin (錢世英) said yesterday.
“We’ll try two things at the same time. First, we’ll ask the Executive Yuan to hold a ministerial meeting on the issue,” Chien told the Taipei Times in a telephone interview after a meeting members of human rights and Tibet-support groups, including the Taiwan Friends of Tibet, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and Amnesty International Taiwan.
“Second, we will try to fulfill their needs for food and shelter right away,” Chien said.
The Tibetans — who entered Taiwan on forged Indian and Nepalese passports five to six years ago — have been staging a sit-in demonstration at Liberty Square in Taipei for the past two weeks, asking the government to grant them asylum.
Most of them escaped to India before arriving in Taiwan. As they have no legal status here, they face constant challenges in gaining employment or healthcare.
Local human rights activists have been helping the Tibetans in negotiations with various government institutions.
The Cabinet would likely recommend a revision to the Immigration Act (出入國及移民法) to make a special case for the 110 Tibetans, Chien said.
“Meanwhile, we will send them to a shelter for illegal immigrants, grant them temporary residency and hand them over to non-governmental organizations,” Chien said.
The Immigration Act states that foreigners whose visa has expired must be deported to their home country. In cases where a foreigner cannot return home, he or she must stay in the custody of the National Immigration Agency.
“They supposedly have to stay in custody before the law is amended, but I don’t think they would feel comfortable about it,” Chien said.
“That’s why we’ll ask some social groups to shelter them after a simplified legal process and grant them temporary residency as they wait on the revision process,” Chien said.
Temporary residency would allow them to live here, but not work, so “at least they won’t have to worry about getting arrested as illegal immigrants,” Chien said.
Taiwan Tibetan Welfare Association secretary-general Lobsang Tenpa said that although the solution was not perfect, “it is acceptable as we can feel their sincerity in helping these people.”
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