Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Yu Tian (余天) yesterday praised the country’s judicial system after he was found not guilty of defamation for alleging President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his family members possessed US passports.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) filed a lawsuit against Yu last August for his remarks during a campaign rally alleging Ma and his family could flee the country anytime. Yu was charged with defamation with intent to cause Ma to fail in his presidential election bid.
The Banciao District Court on Thursday said that what Yu said was based on reasonable doubt and evidence and that he was “expressing appropriate opinions in connection with public interest or affairs meriting public discussion,” as specified in Article 311 of the Criminal Code (刑法).
Yu yesterday said he was relieved to hear this result.
“I can finally breathe,” he told a press conference. “My lawyer told me that I could ask to settle this out of court if I admitted what I did was a crime, but the court told me that if I confessed to a crime, I would have to be stripped of my public duty as a legislator.”
Upon hearing this, Yu said he decided not to settle. When he heard that the district court found him not guilty, he praised the judicial system.
“Many people say that the judicial system is unfair, but I think in this instance, the law is quite fair,” he said.
At a separate setting yesterday, Presidential Office spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) said Ma had already proven that his US green card was invalidated a long time ago, and that he had no US passport.
When asked whether Ma would appeal the case, Wang said the lawsuit was filed by legislators and was a public prosecution. The Presidential Office respected the prosecutors’ authority, he said.
“Yu and the opposition parties have been attacking President Ma with the green card issue, but the truth is he already proved that he had no US passport and that his green card was invalid. It’s very clear,” Wang added.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY MO YAN-CHIH
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