The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday came under fire from legislators for urging people to apply for new Republic of China (ROC) passports after some holders of old-style passports were not allowed to board a plane bound for Ireland.
The ministry began to issue passports with the word “Taiwan” in Roman script on the cover on Sept. 1, 2003, to resolve travel difficulties for Taiwanese nationals because of confusion between the nation’s “ROC” title and China’s official title “People’s Republic of China [PRC].”
However, passports issued before then do not have the “Taiwan” script and do not expire until 10 years after they were issued.
James Lee (李光章), deputy director of the ministry’s Department of European Affairs, said on Tuesday that since July last year, at least 10 holders of old ROC passports without an Irish visa were not allowed to board planes to Ireland by some small European airlines because the airlines did not understand that ROC was equivalent to Taiwan even though Ireland has given Taiwanese nationals visa-free treatment.
Lee urged people in Taiwan to apply for new e-passports to avoid the confusion.
However, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Justin Chou (周守訓), a member of the legislature’s Foreign and National Defense Committee, said he could not agree with Lee. The ministry should have done its best to help Taiwanese travelers avoid the difficulties that arise when immigration officials from other nations cannot tell the differences between the ROC and PRC, he said.
Echoing Chou’s view, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) said instead of urging people to renew their passports, the ministry should make an extra effort to help foreign officials know that the ROC refers to Taiwan.
In response, Liang Guang-chung (梁光中), an official at the Bureau of Consular Affairs, said the cases in Ireland were isolated incidents and the ministry has urged Taiwanese representative offices abroad to help foreign immigration and customs officials understand that both the old and new passports are valid.
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