Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元) yesterday proposed that passengers in a vehicle driven by a drunk driver should face criminal charges for not stopping the driver, given that the legal system does not have effective measures to prevent drinking and driving.
Tsai called a press conference to present his proposal, saying that the recently revised laws against driving under the influence, which some said had “the world’s toughest standards” for alcohol levels in motorists, were not an effective deterrent.
The revisions to the Criminal Code on May 31 lowered the standard ratio of breath-alcohol content for criminal charges for drunk driving from 0.55mg per liter to 0.25mg per liter, or a blood-alcohol content of 0.15mg per liter.
Drivers caught with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.15mg per liter in a Breathalyzer test can be fined up to NT$90,000, while people who cause a death as a result of driving under the influence face up to 10 years in jail.
The number of drunk-driving cases caught from June 13, the day the new rules took effect, to June 23, stood at 2,849, a drop of only 20 percent, showing that it was a less effective deterrent than expected, Tsai said.
Tsai said he would propose an amendment to the Act Governing the Punishment of Violation of Road Traffic Regulations (道路交通管理處罰條例) in the next legislative session to punish passengers in a car driven by a driver who fails an alcohol test.
Taiwan should learn from the experience of Japan, where when a person is caught driving under the influence of alcohol, people who offered the driver alcohol and passengers in the car face a jail term of three years or a fine of ¥500,000 (US$5,120), Tsai said.
Meanwhile, Directorate-General of Personnel Administration Minister Frank Huang (黃富源) said the agency would hold a meeting tomorrow to decide whether to hold senior civil servants responsible for their immediate subordinates in drunk-driving cases.
Huang dismissed a report in the Chinese-language China Times saying that civil servants involved in drunk-driving cases will implicate their immediate superiors.
Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) last week urged public servants not to drink and drive, saying the Public Functionary Discipline Commission would hand down “the most severe punishments” for bureaucrats and officials who violate the drunk-driving laws, meaning that they could be dismissed from their posts.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: