Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chen Ken-te (陳根德) yesterday called for President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to grant a pardon to jailed former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) under the condition that the Democratic Progressive Party reaches agreement with President Ma on the matter.
Chen Ken-te proposed the idea during a question-and-answer session with Premier Sean Chen (陳冲) in the legislature, marking him the second pan-blue politician to appeal for Chen Shui-bian’s medical parole.
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) in August called on the Ma administration to consider granting Chen Shui-bian, who is serving a 17-and-a-half-year sentence for corruption, medical parole.
Chen Ken-te sought the premier’s views on the possibility that Taiwan emulate the granting of pardons to the two former presidents of South Korea, Roh Tae-woo and Chun Doo-hwan, imprisoned for corruption charges, by former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung.
Kim Dae-jung took the initiative to meet with former South Korean president Kim Young-Sam, who put the two corrupt former presidents in jail, and agreed to the pardons through political negotiations, “which was why the South Korea sailed through its economic difficulties then and created its economic achievements today,” the lawmaker said.
Chen Ken-te said the pardons in South Korea and the pardon granted to former US president Richard Nixon both healed political divisions within societies and enabled the people to unite together to move their nations forward.
In response, Sean Chen said that he agreed that granting a pardon to Chen Shui-bian would help improve the political atmosphere, adding that under the Amnesty Act (赦免法), adding that only the president and the Ministry of Justice have the power to make the decision to grant parole, not the premier.
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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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