The legislature yesterday approved four candidates that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) had nominated to the Council of Grand Justices, in a process described by opposition lawmakers as “fraught with flaws.”
On the last day of the legislative session, Chen Be-yue (陳碧玉), Huang Hsi-chun (黃璽君), Lo Chang-fa (羅昌發) and Tang Te-tsung (湯德宗) were approved in a vote from which all 33 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators abstained.
All four candidates passed the threshold for approval of grand justice nominees, 57 votes in the 113-seat legislature, as stipulated in the Act Governing Legislators’ Exercise of Power (立法院職權行使法).
From 73 of the 110 sitting -lawmakers who voted by secret ballot, Chen received 67 support votes, two negative votes and two invalid votes; Huang received 71 support votes, one negative vote and one invalid vote; Lo received 73 affirmative votes and Tang reveived 72 affirmative votes and one invalid vote.
Ma nominated Tang to replace Supreme Court Judge Shao Yen-ling (邵燕玲), who declined the nomination after a public uproar over her role in a controversial ruling in a child molestation case.
Chen was involved in a separate controversy after she was found to have held US nationality and a US green card while serving on the Supreme Court, which prompted concern about her allegiance to the country despite being legally permissible.
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:
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