A Kaohsiung City councilor said on Saturday that the city council should be authorized to investigate the nationality status of all it members before they take office, one day after the Central Election Commission (CEC) revoked Huang Shao-ting’s (黃紹庭) election because he held dual nationality.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) City Councilor Hsiao Yung-ta (蕭永達) told a press conference he would propose an amendment to the Organic and Autonomous Act of the Kaohsiung City Council (高雄市議會組織自治條例) to require that newly elected councilors subject themselves to a council investigation before they are sworn in.
Hsiao said his proposed amendment, dubbed the “Huang Shao-ting Article,” would protect the city council’s reputation.
The commission announced on Friday that it had annulled Huang’s election because he was found to hold dual citizenship after being sworn in as a councilor.
“A letter from the US [Department of State] to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Huang only lost his US citizenship on June 13, 2008. The letter also stated that being sworn in to public office in another country does not constitute a criterion for a US citizen to lose his or her citizenship,” the commission said in a statement.
The Nationality Act (國籍法) bans government officials from holding foreign citizenship and requires that those who do renounce it before assuming office.
Huang, a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), had been sworn in as a Kaohsiung City councilor on Dec. 25, 2005.
Huang said he was shocked to learn of the commission’s move.
Law enforcement authorities received reports last October that Huang held both Republic of China citizenship and US citizenship and launched an investigation.
In testimony before the commission, Huang said he obtained US citizenship when he lived and worked in the US, but that he had filed an application to renounce his US citizenship on Dec. 20, 2005, five days before he was sworn in as a member of the Kaohsiung City Council.
The council said it stopped paying Huang’s councilor salary following the commission’s announcement, but had not decided on whether to try to recover the money paid Huang and his assistants over the past three years.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods