The government would be humiliating the Legislative Yuan and disregarding the public if it were to refuse to send the agreements signed in the forthcoming cross-strait negotiations to the legislature for review, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislative caucus said yesterday.
“The content of the third Chiang-Chen meeting is highly controversial. If the resolutions from the meeting can avoid legislative review, then the legislature would be humiliated three times,” DPP Legislator Lee Chun-yi (李俊毅) told a press conference at the Legislative Yuan.
Lee made the remarks in response to a Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) report yesterday, which said that the government had decided that the three agreements scheduled to be signed in next month’s meeting between the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and the Association of Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) did not need to go through legislative scrutiny.
SEF Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) and ARATS Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) are scheduled to meet possible early next month to sign three agreements on financial cooperation, regular direct flights and joint efforts to combat crime.
Lee said yesterday the DPP would lodge “a serious protest” if the agreements were to dodge the legislative process. DPP Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) mocked the government for “not even being willing to treat the legislature like a rubber stamp” despite the fact that the agreements could easily coast through the legislature given the fact that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) holds two-thirds of the seats in the legislature.
DPP Legislator Wong Chin-chu (翁金珠) panned the government for disregarding the will of the people and the Legislative Yuan, adding that the DPP caucus’ effort to present a draft bill stipulating the premises before any signing of cross-strait agreements had been blocked 19 times. She said her proposal to set up a task force within the Legislative Yuan on cross-strait affairs was also blocked.
“This clearly means that the administration doesn’t wish to find out what the people are thinking and it doesn’t want the legislature to keep an eye on the Chiang-Chen meetings,” she said.
When asked for comment, KMT caucus secretary-general Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔) said that in accordance with the Act Governing Relations between Peoples of the Taiwan Area and Peoples of the Mainland Area (兩岸人民關係條例), the agreements to be signed in the next round of cross-strait negotiations would only be referred to the legislature for “reference.” Despite this, she said, the KMT caucus would carry out its duty of supervising the government when the agreements are sent to the legislature.
Additional reporting by Flora Wang
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