Aboriginal rights advocates yesterday protested a proposed amendment to the Act for the Utilization and Transfer of Reserved Mountainous Land (山坡地保育利用條例) that seeks to relax restrictions on the transfer of Aboriginal reserve land, worrying it may accelerate the loss of Aboriginal land to non-Aborigines.
The existing law stipulates that, after obtaining ownership of a plot of Aboriginal reserve land, an Aboriginal person is required to hold it for at least five years before it can be sold.
Several Aboriginal lawmakers — Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators Jeng Tian-tsair (鄭天財) and Liao Kuo-tung (廖國棟) of the Amis tribe, Kung Wen-chi (孔文吉) of the Sediq and Chien Tung-ming (簡東明) of the Paiwan; People First Party Legislator Lin Cheng-er (林正二) of the Amis; and Non-Partisan Solidarity Union Legislator May Chin (高金素梅) of the Atayal — have jointly proposed an amendment to do away with the five-year rule.
“If the amendment is passed, it would accelerate the loss of Aboriginal reserve land, since a lot of Aboriginal reserve land is being occupied by non-Aborigines for developing luxury houses, boutique hotels or resorts,” Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) told a press conference.
“The restriction should not be relaxed until there’s a way to prevent such a problem occuring,” he said.
Lin Chang-mao (林長茂) of the Green Formosa Front said that in Fusing Township (復興), Taoyuan County, a traditional domain of the Atayals, as much as 70 percent of the land is being used by non-Aborigines.
“At the moment, a private developer is planning a project which would occupy 145.72 hectares of mostly Aboriginal reserve land in Fusing. So far, 60 hectares of land is yet to be acquired due to the five-year rule,” Lin said.
“If the five-year rule is voided, non-Aboriginal developers could get hold of Aboriginal land immediately,” he added.
Jeng, the leading proposer of the amendment, disagreed with the advocates at a separate setting.
“The reason why I’ve proposed the amendment is that I think Aborigines should be given the same right as non-Aborigines when handling their land — if there’s no five-year rule for non-Aborigines, why should owners of Aboriginal land have to wait for five years before being allowed to sell?” Jeng said.
“There’s no need to worry about Aborigines losing their land, because according to the law, ownership of Aboriginal reserve land can only be transferred to another Aborigine,” he added.
He said there were non-Aborigines who would utilize Aboriginal reserve land by using an Aborigine as proxy to buy the land.
“But instead of putting restrictions on Aborigines, the government should go after non-Aborigines engaged in unlawful activities,” he said.
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
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
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