The US has put forth a draft extradition treaty with Taiwan, Taiwan’s Deputy Representative to the US Leo Lee (李澄然) said in Washington on Thursday.
The two sides are currently negotiating details to resolve differences, Lee said, adding that the agreement will need to be endorsed by both countries’ legislatures after it is signed.
In Taipei, Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials remained tight-lipped on the treaty when asked to comment.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添) said Taiwan and the US are seeking to enhance judicial cooperation on the basis of the Agreement on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters (台美刑事司法互助協定), which was signed in 2002, by signing an extradition treaty.
However, Yang added he was not aware of the draft extradition treaty presented by the US.
Also saying he had no comment, director-general of the ministry’s Department of North American Affairs Bruce Linghu (令狐榮達) said the time was not ripe for the ministry to reveal any negotiation details.
“There is still much to study as the US is a common law country, while Taiwan’s legal system is a civil law system. In addition to the differences in the legal systems adopted, both sides have different concerns on the extradition treaty,” Linghu said.
According to Deputy Minister of Justice Chen Shou-huang (陳守煌), Taiwan began to talk with the US about signing such a treaty in 2008, but the ministry had no understanding of the content of the draft put forward by the US.
In October, American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Director William Stanton was quoted as saying in an interview with the Chinese--language United Daily News that one complicated issue involved in the matter was whether Taiwanese holding US citizenship could be extradited under the treaty.
AIT did not comment yesterday, citing the need to clarify information with Washington.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
A magnitude 5.7 earthquake yesterday struck off the coast of Hualien, causing brief transportation disruptions in northern and eastern Taiwan, as authorities said that aftershocks of magnitude 5 or higher could occur over the next three days. The quake, which hit at 7:24pm at a depth of 24.5km, registered an intensity of 4 in Hualien and Nantou counties, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. In Taipei, the MRT railway’s operations control center received an earthquake alert and initiated standard safety procedures, briefly halting trains on the Bannan (blue) line for about a minute.
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