Minister of Justice Tseng Yung-fu (曾勇夫) promised yesterday to crack down on the alleged sale of human organs by death row prisoners disguised as organ donations.
“Organ donations should be made without any payment,” Tseng said in response to a report in the Chinese-language Apple Daily that an individual had “ordered an organ” from a death row prisoner and was paying for it with a NT$300,000 “funeral subsidy.”
The report said that several other death row inmates had signed agreements, after being lobbied by brokers, to have their organs removed for transplants after they are executed. In return, the prisoners’ families would receive about NT$200,000 to NT$400,000 per organ, the report said.
Tseng said voluntary organ donations by death row inmates was a good thing, but the buying and selling organs would be strictly prohibited.
Ministry of Justice (MOJ) officials have been asked to investigate and Tseng said any wrongdoing would be dealt with accordingly.
Taiwan carried out its first executions in five years in April after then-justice minister Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) spoke out in early March in favor of a ban on the death penalty. Her stance drew complaints from crime victims’ families that the government was not obeying the law.
The Constitutional Court last month rejected a petition by the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty to commute the executions of the remaining 40 inmates on death row.
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