The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said it was consulting with certain foreign representative offices in Taiwan to make it easier for Taiwanese applicants to secure student and immigrant visas.
The ministry was responding to a report in the Chinese-language Apple Daily that Republic of China passport holders had been forced to fly to Hong Kong to apply for long-term visas to other countries.
A high-school student headed to Sweden on a one-year exchange program, for example, was told to travel to Hong Kong in person -because Sweden no longer offers visa services in Taiwan.
Its visa services division was closed down because of a reduced workload after Taiwanese tourists were granted visa exemptions for short-term travel to Schengen area countries earlier this year.
Canada is another country that has curtailed visa services and the Apple Daily quoted one traveler as saying that in asking Taiwanese to apply for a Canadian immigration visa in Hong Kong, Canada was compromising Taiwan’s sovereignty.
The newspaper blamed the problems on the government’s push to secure visa waivers for Taiwanese travelers. Taiwan now has visa exemption or visa on arrival agreements with 114 countries or areas.
Ministry spokesman James Chang (章計平) said most long-term visas could be applied for by sending or delivering applications to designated offices or applying directly online, except in the cases of Sweden and Canada.
He said the government has been in contact with their representative offices to work out how to reduce inconvenient procedures when obtaining student and immigrant visas.
“All university students can apply for Swedish student visas over the Internet, but due to technical problems, the service is presently not available for high-school students,” he said, adding that the ministry was in talks with Sweden to improve the situation.
Chang rejected arguments that the visa application problems reflected a downgrading of Taiwan’s sovereignty.
“There are no other implications,” Chang said. “The closing down of foreign offices in the country is beneficial to human resource management, as there are more visa applications coming in from Hong Kong than from Taiwan.”
The Canadian Trade Office in Taipei concurred.
“The closing down of offices is to ensure more efficient use of resources,” an official in the office said by telephone.
The official said that all long-term Canadian visa applications should be mailed directly to Hong Kong for processing and that face-to-face interviews were rarely required.
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