Taiwanese who do not have a passport or whose passport is invalid will be able to have it renewed at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, as long as they have paid their flight tickets and their flight takes off within 12 hours, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced yesterday.
The announcement came in the wake of an incident in which Vice President Wu Den-yih’s (吳敦義) daughter was able to get her son’s passport renewed just before boarding a flight on Friday last week. Since the incident, the ministry has received an increasing number of complaints as netizens recounted their experiences of being sent to the Bureau of Council Affairs in Taipei to renew their passport after they discovered at the airport that their passport was invalid.
Some criticized what they said was the special privilege with which Wu’s grandson was able to get a new passport in just an hour’s time.
The ministry has said that the service has long been available to the general public, but that the service was usually only extended to people who needed to go abroad to help their family members in an emergency.
Wu’s daughter left for Palau for a family vacation.
Due to the limited resources at the ministry’s Emergency Contact Centers at the airport, passengers might not get their passports renewed before scheduled departure time if too many people need the service at the same time.
The two Emergency Contact Centers at the airport are staffed by four people, who have to deal with other services — mainly calls through a 24-hour help line for Taiwanese who encounter emergency situations — and only have one passport printing machine, the ministry said, urging people to check their passports before leaving for a trip to ensure that they were valid for at least another six months.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods