Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Diane Lee (李慶安), who previously promised to prove the nullification of her US citizenship by Jan. 31, failed to present any evidence by the deadline on Saturday.
Lee, who was sworn into her fourth legislative term on Feb. 1 last year, resigned from her post last month after more than 300 days of speculation about dual citizenship.
Lee Yun-ran (李永然), Diane Lee’s attorney, said on Saturday that the former legislator was no longer obliged to present the documentation by Saturday — one year after assuming office, as stipulated in the Nationality Act (國籍法) — because she had resigned.
Lee Yun-ran said he would contact his client to check on the progress of the US State Department’s review of the document.
Diane Lee was unavailable for comment.
The former legislator found herself surrounded by controversy when accusations surfaced last March that she had not renounced her US citizenship.
At the time, Diane Lee said she had obtained her US citizenship 20 years ago and that she had “automatically” given up her US citizenship when she took an oath to become a Taipei City councilor in 1994.
Amid the controversy, Diane Lee applied for a document proving the loss of her US citizenship with the US State Department.
In the meantime, the legislature also asked for the assistance of the State Department through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to probe the nationality status of all of the 113 lawmakers.
The ministry received an answer from the US on Nov. 26, but did not release it to the legislature until Dec. 24, at which time a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator made it public.
The State Department said that Lee “has previously been documented as a US citizen with a US passport and … no subsequent loss of US citizenship has been documented.”
But Diane Lee said that the State Department had not completed the review of a document proving the loss of her US citizenship and vowed to present the document by Saturday.
After a number of civic groups threatened to besiege the legislature, she announced her resignation on Jan 8 — the eve of the protest.
When asked for comment, KMT caucus secretary-general Chang Sho-wen (張碩文) said on Saturday that there was no need for Diane Lee to submit evidence to the legislature to show that she had lost her US citizenship because she was no longer a legislator.
However, DPP caucus whip William Lai (賴清德) said the DPP caucus would demand that the KMT caucus, the KMT headquarters and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) present the evidence for Diane Lee because she had allegedly committed fraud.
Lai also urged prosecutors to investigate the case and recover the salary Diane Lee received as a legislator.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching