Taipei Society members yesterday criticized the Referendum Review Committee’s decision to block a referendum proposal submitted by the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) about the government’s plan to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China and challenged the committee members to a debate.
“Since I was a child, I have been taught that the government’s power comes from the people and I’ve never been taught that the people need the government’s consent to execute their power,” Taipei Society executive member Hung Yu-hung (洪裕宏) told a press conference in Taipei. “Referendums are a right granted by the Constitution. I wonder when the Referendum Review Committee got the power to deny the people a constitutional right.”
Most of the committee members who voted to block the proposal are college professors, he said.
PHOTO: LIAO CHEN-HUEI, TAIPEI TIMES
“I wonder how they will be able to explain that decision to their students or to their fellow academics?” Hung said.
Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), a law research fellow at Academia Sinica, said the voice of the people was not being heard.
“They say the [ECFA] referendum proposal turned down last year was submitted by the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] and this one was submitted by the TSU, but I disagree,” Huang said. “Each referendum proposal was endorsed by more than 100,000 people, on the streets and in markets, who wanted their voices heard.”
“Politicians and political parties were only acting as the public’s agents,” he said.
On June 4, the Referendum Committee voted 12 to four to block a referendum proposal submiited by the TSU that would ask the question: “Do you agree that the government should sign an ECFA with China?”
The committee rejected a similar referendum proposed by the DPP last year.
The Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that a referendum proposal must be endorsed by 0.5 percent of the number of eligible voters in the last presidential election — which would be about 80,000 in this case — in the initial stage. In the second stage, signatures from 5 percent of the number of eligible voters in the last presidential election — approximately 800,000 — must be collected before a referendum vote can be held.
The committee said in its statement that the proposal had been rejected because its wording was “confusing,” since the TSU opposes signing an ECFA and a referendum should only ask voters’ opinion about changing something that has already been done.
“Some [committee] members are worried that the wording of the referendum question may be confusing to voters, but this was not their business,” said another Taipei Society executive member, a sociology professor at National Chengchi University. “Their job is only to check to see if the proposal meets all the criteria as stated in the law and leave the contents to be voted on by the people.”
Taipei Society chairwoman Huang Hsiu-tuan (黃秀端) said that as most committee members were, like the members of the society, academics, they should be rational people and must have had more convincing reasons to block the proposal.
“We have decided to invite all the memebers of the Referendum Review Committee — regardless of whether they voted for or against the proposal — to a debate,” she said. “An invitation to the debate will be delivered to all the members soon.”
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