The four Council of Grand Justices nominees yesterday all pledged that they would not apply for permanent resident status in other countries or foreign citizenship amid concerns about allegiance to the country in their review at the legislature.
Two of the candidates for grand Justice, nominated by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in March, have been mired in controversy since the nominations were announced.
Chen Be-yu (陳碧玉), head of the Judicial Yuan’s Judicial Personnel Study Center, was a US citizen and then held a US green card for 18 months while serving on the Supreme Court. Lo Chang-fa (羅昌發), a professor at National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, once held permanent residency in Canada.
During a question-and-answer session to review their credentials, several lawmakers from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday asked the four nominees if they planned to apply for foreign citizenship or move overseas after they retire from the council.
DPP Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) asked whether Lo’s nomination was a reward for helping to draw up the cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), saying Lo was one the architects of the agreement.
Lo denied that, saying he provided only legal views on the construction of its articles.
Another nominee, Huang Hsi-chun (黃璽君), a judge at the Supreme Administrative Court, was criticized because her performance appraisal during her tenure at the court ranked her in the bottom 10 percent for four consecutive years.
In her defense, Huang said it was because of an assessment system in which performance was appraised on the basis of the number of cases that remained unsolved.
KMT Legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) questioned the “handful” of research papers published in journals between 2006 and this year by another nominee, Tang Te-tsung (湯德宗), a professor of constitutional law at National Taiwan University.
“That is because most of the articles I wrote were published in books,” Tang said.
The confirmation vote has been scheduled for Tuesday.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching