Following an attack on a long-time environmentalist Chen Jiau-hua (陳椒華) — allegedly for her participation in a campaign against a local garbage dump in Dongshan District (東山), Greater Tainan City — representatives from several environmental groups yesterday condemned violence and urged the government to deal with the case immediately.
“The attack on Chen shows the government’s incapabilities,” Taiwan Hsinchu Foundation chairman Sam Lin (林聖崇) told a press conference in Taipei. “Obviously, the government is incapable of protecting its citizens and it’s also incapable of protecting the environment.”
“If the government did a good job protecting the environment, then citizens like us would not have to risk our lives to campaign for environmental issues,” he said.
Lin said that if the government does not find out who committed the crime against Chen and who was behind the attack, “the government would be an accomplice.”
Chen, an associate professor at Chianan University of Pharmacy and Science and a long-time environmental campaigner, was beaten by two men with sticks on Monday night when she was getting into her car after leaving the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union’s (TEPU) Tainan office, she said.
The two men ran away when people in the neighborhood and her colleagues came out to see what was happening after they heard Chen screaming and honking her car horn, she said.
“I’m not afraid, I just feel sorry for the worry I’m putting my family and friends through,” Chen told the press conference. “This is not the first time something like this has happened — the tires on my car have been stabbed twice before, we’ve seen people in black walking around the TEPU’s Tainan office, I’ve received silent phone calls at night and former TEPU Tainan director Huang An-tiao (黃安調) was attacked near his house last year and we still don’t know who did that.”
Several other environmental activists — including Wild at Heart Legal Defense Foundation chairman Robin Winkler (文魯彬), the foundation’s secretary-general Lin Tzu-lin (林子凌), Green Party Taiwan spokesman Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲) and TEPU president Wang Chun-shou (王俊秀) — also claimed to have been either physically attacked or verbally threatened on several occasions.
“Environmental groups speak up for the environment because the environment cannot speak up for itself,” Homemakers’ Union Foundation for Environmental Protection chairwoman Chen Man-li (陳曼麗) said. “One day, when the environment has had enough and it decides to fight back, we are all going to be the victims.”
She said that should the physical and verbal attacks continue to happen to environmentalists, “one day, there may be no one who dares to come out and speak up for the environment and that would be a tragedy.”
Dozens of environmental activists marched to the Ministry of the Interior after the press conference to urge the ministry to intervene effectively.
Criminal Investigation Bureau Deputy-Director Lin Kun-huang (林昆煌) received the activists and promised to put in the maximum effort to solve the case.
“We’ve formed a special task force with local police in Tainan and we’re working very hard on it,” Lin said.
The environmentalists said Chen may have been attacked because of her involvement in a 10-year campaign against a garbage dump project run by Young Yang Environmental Industry Corp.
Local residents are worried that the planned garbage dump’s proximity to Wushantou Reservoir (烏山頭水庫) may pollute the water.
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods