Calling the Referendum Review Committee a “monster” that destroys people’s right to plebiscites, Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) Chairman Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝) submitted a referendum proposal, endorsed by more than 94,000 citizens, to abolish the committee.
Bringing boxes containing 94,184 endorsements for the TSU referendum proposal, Huang, along with several party officials, handed the petition to the Central Election Commission yesterday morning.
“Since April last year, I’ve initiated three referendums on the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), and each time it was rejected by the Executive Yuan’s Referendum Review Committee,” Huang told reporters outside the commission’s office.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
“Referendums are a right of the people protected by the Constitution and the committee has apparently become a monster that places its own opinion over that of the people and deprives people of their right to express their own opinions,” he said.
Huang said more than 30,000 people endorsed his initiatives for a referendum on whether the people approved of the government’s plan to sign the ECFA, yet, the government didn’t seem to care about the voices of those tens of thousands of citizens.
“This is why I’ve initiated yet another referendum proposal on abolishing the Referendum Review Committee and I urge the members of the committee to refrain from reviewing the proposal to avoid conflict of interests,” Huang said.
He said that according to the Referendum Act (公民投票法), the committee’s duty is to assist the public in holding referendums, “but it has become a tool for the ruling party to block the nation’s citizens from expressing their views through referendums — it certainly should be abolished.”
According to the Referendum Act, an initiator of a referendum must submit the proposal with signatures from 0.5 percent of the number of eligible voters in the previous presidential election — which now stands at a little more than 86,000 — in the first phase. After the committee approves the proposal, the initiator may proceed with a second-phase endorsement process to get signatures from 5 percent of the number of eligible voters from the previous presidential election.
The Central Election Commission accepted the proposal from the TSU and will have the Referendum Review Committee complete the first-phase review process within 30 days before informing the TSU to begin the second-phase endorsement process.
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