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.
Taiwanese scientists have engineered plants that can capture about 50 percent more carbon dioxide and produce more than twice as many seeds as unmodified plants, a breakthrough they hope could one day help mitigate global warming and grow more food staples such as rice. If applied to major food crops, the new system could cut carbon emissions and raise yields “without additional equipment or labor costs,” Academia Sinica researcher and lead author the study Lu Kuan-jen (呂冠箴) said. Academia Sinica president James Liao (廖俊智) said that as humans emit 9.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide compared with the 220 billion tonnes absorbed
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