Certain laws could be amended to offer better protection to religious freedom in Taiwan, the recently published 2011 US International Religious Freedom Report said.
Labor laws and immigration regulations could be improved, the report said, saying Taiwan’s labor laws do not protect the right of Catholic foreign workers to go to church once a week.
“An estimated 80,000 foreign workers in Taiwan are Catholic and, in the absence of a guaranteed day off, they are often unable to fulfill their religious duties,” the report said, adding that the Council of Labor Affairs is currently addressing the issue.
With regards to foreigners who wish to obtain missionary visas, the report said: “Taiwan’s immigration law does not have a formal provision for missionary visas for individuals who do not have the rank of priest or nun.”
The report, which was released by the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and covers last year, also highlighted the first case in Taiwan of an employer being fined for religious discrimination. Last year, the government fined a private Catholic school NT$60,000 for firing two US teachers who were Mormons.
The Taipei school said the teachers were “actively working against Catholic belief and that one was offering extra credit to students who attended Mormon religious services,” it 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:
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