Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) said yesterday that a human rights committee under the Presidential Office will set up an agency specifically to report on the human rights situation nationwide.
The agency will function in compliance with the Paris Principles, Siew said during a discussion on human rights with experts and academics in the latest weekly online broadcast by the Presidential Office.
“I hope the committee will work out a mechanism to effectively strengthen the protection of human rights in this country and establish an exclusive agency to handle related matters based on the Paris Principles,” he said.
The first task of the committee, which was set up on International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, was to devise a mechanism for reporting on human rights nationwide in line with two international conventions — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, he said.
In response to a call for the death penalty to be abolished in Taiwan, the vice president said the government is moving toward that goal, but it cannot be achieved overnight, or before a consensus has been reached.
The 18-member Presidential Committee on Human Rights is led by Siew and Chai Sung-lin (柴松林), honorary president of the Taipei-based Chinese Association for Human Rights. Other members include Vice Premier Sean Chen and people from the private sector.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift