Chunghwa Post is proposing an amendment the Postal Act (郵政法), which requires its employees to secure approval of either the senders or recipients before opening any suspicious mail or package.
Currently, Article 10 of the Postal Act states that neither the company nor its employees may open items of mail belonging to others.
However, the article does not apply if substantial evidence suggests that the contents of the item of mail are contraband or that the received preferential rate does not apply to the mail item. Nor does it apply when it is necessary to open the mail in the case of undeliverable mail in order to return it to the sender. Chunghwa Post can do so without securing the approval of either the senders or recipients.
Chunghwa Post vice president Chen Tzu-de (陳賜得) said the amendment was proposed in compliance with the Enforcement Rules of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural, which came into effect last year.
According to Chen, mail delivery personnel normally have to open mail or packages when they are undeliverable, because the contents sometimes may include addresses or contact information of the recipients or senders. Rarely have they received mail containing dangerous items, he said.
Statistics from Chunghwa Post showed that it receives approximately 397,000 undeliverable packages per year and 97.5 percent of them are ads or regular mail.
The post offices will make an announcement allowing people to identify undeliverable mail. If the mail remains unclaimed for more than a month, some of the valuable unclaimed items will be placed on an auction.
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