The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday urged the Canadian government to ensure a better attitude among immigration officers at its airports.
The ministry made the call in the wake of an incident in which a Taiwanese woman alleged mistreatment by Canadian immigration officials.
Lee Chun-hua (李春花), a 50-year-old from Taichung who does not speak English, was questioned for five hours at Vancouver International Airport on March 10. She was eventually deported and her visa revoked.
“We regard this as an isolated case, but we’ve asked the Canadian government to review the way its immigration officers question [visitors] and make improvements in that regard,” Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添) told a press conference yesterday.
Asked to elaborate on whether Lee was mistreated by Canadian officers, as she alleges, Yang said: “Based on Lee’s complaint, if what she said is true, there is a lot of room for improvement on the Canadian side. That’s why we made our demand.”
Immediately after the press conference, the Presidential Office issued a statement saying that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) had talked to Yang by telephone and instructed the ministry to tell Canada it must take Taiwan’s concerns over the matter seriously.
While asking the ministry to gain a better understanding of what happened to Lee, the statement also instructed officials to take action to ensure that Taiwanese citizens are treated with proper respect and their rights protected overseas.
The ministry should ask that Canada account for the incident, the statement said, adding that “If Canada fails to give a rational explanation for this, MOFA should lodge an official protest.”
Yang, however, did not relay Canada’s explanation of the incident, nor did he answer a question on whether Canada had apologized to Lee.
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