Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chu Fong-chi (朱鳳芝) and members of the Tai Ji Men Qigong Academy yesterday urged the government to respect the human rights of those under investigation by prosecutors and prevent abuse of authority in the detention of suspects.
At a legislative press conference, Chu said Judicial Yuan statistics showed that 5,435 people were granted cash compensation for being detained or jailed on false charges between 1998 and 2008.
The amount of money totaled NT$4.6 billion (US$144.8 million), Chu said, adding that law enforcement personnel in charge of the cases were never held responsible.
Tai Ji Men founder Hong Tao-tze (洪道子), Hong’s wife Yu Mei-jung (游美容), and Hong’s disciples Chen Tiao-hsin (陳調欣) and Peng Li-chuan (彭麗娟) said they had been victims of abuse of power.
They said they were detained for several months in a fraud investigation in 1996, but were acquitted after nearly 11 months of trial.
The four Tai Ji Men members received about NT$1.8 million in compensation from the government, but they said “what was done [to them] can never be undone.”
They said they would donate the money to a human rights advisory committee the Presidential Office plans to establish, adding that they hoped what happened to them would never be repeated.
They were referring to a suggestion President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) made last Thursday asking relevant agencies to explore the feasibility of setting up a human rights advisory commission as a special unit under the Presidential Office to coordinate human rights policies and to prepare national human rights reports.
If Ma gets his wish, it would run counter to a January 2006 Legislative Yuan resolution requesting that non-institutional bodies set up under the Presidential Office be dissolved. As a result, then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) stopped the functions of the Human Rights Advisory Committee and the Science and Technology Advisory Committee to show the Presidential Office’s respect for the legislature.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY STAFF WRITER
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift