The Taiwan High Court yesterday ruled that former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) will be held in custody for another two months when his current detention order expires next Friday.
Presiding judge Teng Chen-chiu (鄧振球) said Chen might flee the country if he were released. He added that Chen should remain in custody as his family has yet to hand over NT$700 million (US$21 million) allegedly stashed away in Switzerland.
“We cannot rule out the possibility that the defendant or his family may take charge of the assets. The defendant is also seen as a flight risk,” the court said in a statement.
On April 2, the High Court gave an ultimatum to Chen’s relatives, saying that if the money is returned Chen would have a good chance of being released on bail.
Chen’s son, Chen Chih-chung (陳致中), held a press conference on Friday last week and said his family had done everything they could to get the money in the Chen family’s Swiss bank accounts remitted to Taiwan and that it was up to the Special Investigation Panel to decide when the transfer would take place.
On Thursday, in a statement to the Central News Agency, Swiss judicial authorities said they would hand over the assets to Taiwanese authorities as soon as possible, but gave no timetable.
It was the first time the Office of the Attorney-General (OAG) of Switzerland has commented publicly on the case.
“There is an excellent collaboration between the Taiwanese authorities and the OAG,” OAG spokeswoman Jeannette Balmer, wrote in the statement. “The objective target of this collaboration is the handover of the assets to the Taiwanese authorities as early as possible [ie practicable].”
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: