President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday that screening of candidates for four seats on the Council of Grand Justices should be fast-tracked to ensure the court’s normal operations.
Speaking at the inaugural meeting of a seven-member panel formed earlier this week to screen candidates for the constitutional court bench, Ma said a short list of candidates should be finalized as soon as possible so that the Legislative Yuan can vote on it during the current session.
TERMS FINISHED
The terms of four of the 15 incumbent grand justices — Hsu Pi-hu (徐璧湖) Lin Tzu-yi (林子儀), Hsu Tzong-li (許宗力) and Hsu Yu-hsiu (許玉秀) — will end on Sept. 30, and according to the Additional Articles of the Constitution, the president must nominate and appoint, with the consent of the legislature, four new justices to fill the positions.
Aiming to have the new -justices take the bench on Oct. 1 as required by existing regulations, the president wants the legislature to deal with nominations before it goes into summer recess at the end of May.
Grand justices are authorized to interpret the Constitution and unify the interpretation of laws and ordinances.
CRUCIAL ROLE
Ma said the role of grand justices is even more crucial in today’s judicial climate, where 76 percent of cases involving constitutional and legal interpretations are related to the public’s rights and interests.
OPEN PROCESS
Although haste was the theme in his address, Ma still asked members of the special panel to screen nominees based on a process that is open, fair and just.
Ma has named Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) and six legal experts to staff the panel. Siew serves as the panel’s convener, while two former Judicial Yuan presidents, Weng Yueh-sheng (翁岳生) and Lai Ing-jaw (賴英照), will be its deputy conveners.
The four other members include former Judicial Yuan vice president Hsieh Tsai-chuan (謝在全) and three former justices — Wu Keng (吳庚), Wang Tze-chien (王澤鑑) and Wang Ho-hsiung (王和雄).
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS