A European parliament delegation is to visit Taiwan later this month to show support for Taipei’s demands over the fatal shooting of a local fisherman by a Philippine government vessel on May 9.
Ryszard Legutko, a Polish politician and deputy chairman of the Conservatives and Reformists Group, will lead four other members of the parliament to Taiwan to hand over a letter of support to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), conveying their condolences for the death of 65-year-old Hung Shih-cheng (洪石成), according to the Taipei Representative Office to the EU.
The letter, signed by Tomasz Poreba, Suzy de Martini, Ryszard Czarnecki and Marek Grobarczyk, who will be accompanying Legutko, also criticizes the Philippine officials for not providing humanitarian assistance to Hung and the other fishermen on the boat after they had sprayed the vessel with bullets, the representative office said.
The delegation urged the Philippine government to conduct a thorough investigation, sign a fisheries agreement with Taiwan and establish rules for the two sides that will guide their conduct when vessels are operating in their overlapping economic zones, the office said.
The incident has triggered a diplomatic row and led Taiwan to impose sanctions on the Philippines.
Meanwhile, Ivo Vajgl, another member of the European parliament, wrote to Catherine Ashton, the high representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, to express his concerns over the incident.
“The use of lethal force against an unarmed fishing boat goes against international law, and this act by the Philippine authorities cannot be justified,” the Slovenian lawmaker said in a letter dated May 23. He also sent a copy of the letter to the Philippine ambassador to Belgium, Victoria Bataclan.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
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