The Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) yesterday filed an administrative lawsuit over the rejection by government agencies of its application to hold a referendum on a cross-strait trade pact, saying that the government’s current referendum proposal on a nuclear power plant adopted the same rationale as the TSU’s rejected initiative.
If President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration, which supports the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, was allowed to ask people if they support the suspension of the construction of the plant in a planned national referendum, the TSU proposal should not have been rejected for asking a question that was inconsistent with the proposer’s position, TSU Chairman Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝) said after filing the lawsuit at the Taipei High Administrative Court.
“If the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] can ask people if they support the suspension of the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in a proposed national referendum, despite the party supporting the construction, the referendum proposed by the TSU on the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement [ECFA] should not have been rejected,” Huang said.
In August last year, the Referendum Review Committee under the Executive Yuan rejected the TSU’s referendum proposal on the ECFA, which asked voters if they agree with Taiwan’s signature on the agreement with China, saying that the question was inconsistent with the party’s position.
Huang said the rejection was even more intolerable because the committee handed it down after the Supreme Administrative Court overruled the Taipei High Administrative Court’s dismissal of the previous lawsuit Huang had filed for the same cause and ruled that the committee must review the application.
“I would like to see how the Referendum Review Committee handles the KMT’s proposal and whether it deals with the two cases with different standards,” Huang said.
He also accused the KMT of asking two questions — whether voters would support the suspension of the construction and the suspension of the nuclear plant’s operations — in its referendum proposal, which is prohibited by the Referendum Act (公民投票法).
The TSU had proposed its so-called “ECFA referendum” three times after the agreement was signed in June 2010, but each proposal was rejected by the Referendum Review Committee.
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
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
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