Pingpu Aboriginal activist Jason Pan (潘紀揚) yesterday denied a statement by the Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) that the UN has rejected a petition he filed to sue the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government for not recognizing Pingpu Aborigines’ Aboriginal status.
Pan, director of the Taiwan Association for Rights Advancements for Pingpu Plains Aborigines, made the remarks at a press conference in Taipei held following his recent return from UN headquarters in Geneva.
Pan said he, along with Siraya Culture Association chairwoman Wan Shu-chuan (萬淑娟), attended the UN Experts Mechanism Session on the Rights of Indigenous Populations, which took place from July 12 until Friday last week.
During the session, Pan said he gave a five-minute briefing on the situation of Taiwan’s Pingpu Aborigines and suggested that the session send people to Taiwan to learn more about the Pingpu Aborigines.
He added that he had met with James Anaya, the UN’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples.
“Anaya accepted the petition and we met several times during the meeting in Geneva,” Pan said. “What proof does the CIP have to claim that my petition was rejected?”
Pan said that while Anaya has expressed sympathy and understanding, he did not specify when he might dispatch people to Taiwan for further investigation.
The Pingpu used to live in the plains areas of Taiwan.
They were recognized as Aborigines until the 1950s, when they failed to register their ethnic status with local governments and in recent decades they have been struggling to regain the status.
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
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
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