An attempt by a government watchdog group to get legislators to pledge reforms in the Legislative Yuan has yielded a poor response.
The Citizen Congress Watch (CCW) recently sent the legislature’s 113 members a letter asking them to move toward reforms that would increase transparency in the body during the current session. As of the end of last month, only 40 had signed up.
The CCW says that legislative meetings are not open enough and has long petitioned for the legislature to push through amendments that would make proceedings more transparent.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Policy Committee chief Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池) said that during the previous legislative session, the KMT and the CCW had problems interacting.
The KMT caucus then decided that its members should not -cooperate with the watchdog’s requests, Lin said.
Since the beginning of the seventh legislature, the KMT has listed the CCW as an “unwelcome group” because the party is unhappy with how the watchdog conducts its performance evaluations of legislators, Lin said.
However, the KMT caucus opened its doors to the watchdog in March last year in an attempt to ameliorate the situation, Lin said.
Soon afterward, Lin said, the KMT again decided to stop cooperating with the CCW and refused to offer any records of speeches, attendance or information on government oversight because of a request by the watchdog to the legislature’s standing committee conveners to allow sit-ins during committee meetings.
However, some KMT legislators have continued to cooperate with the CCW and have accepted their performance evaluations and recommendations.
Lin said that any changes to its current stance of non--cooperation would depend on whether the situation between the KMT and the CCW improved or not, adding that the caucus would make further decisions after a meeting on the subject.
This is why the majority of pan-blue members have withheld responses to the CCW’s letter, Lin said.
Meanwhile, KMT Deputy -Secretary-General Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) rejected the request, saying that the CCW was impolite toward legislators and that the group’s demand that legislators reply to the letter within a certain time period was “arrogant and crossed the line.”
Wu said he strongly supported the motion not to cooperate with the organization.
In response, CCW chairman Koo Chung-hwa (顧忠華) said the KMT’s attitude did not matter, adding that the group had served its purpose of highlighting legislators’ attitude toward the watchdog group, and voters would decide.
Koo said the CCW would visit legislators in the hopes that they would cooperate and sign the pledge and would announce the results of its drive at a later date.
So far, 30 signatures from Democratic Progressive Party legislators and about 10 from KMT legislators have been received, Koo said.
Translated by Jake Chung, Staff writer
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