The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday continued to boycott Premier Jiang Yi-huah’s (江宜樺) report to the legislature as Jiang refused to apologize for what the DPP claims is his “infringement of the separation of powers and contempt of the Legislative Yuan.”
Jiang has been unable to deliver his required report since the current legislative session began on Sept. 17 due to disagreement over the demand made by the DPP, which has staged boycotts in four consecutive legislative plenaries.
Two-party negotiations convened by Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) yesterday again failed to resolve the impasse, forcing Jiang and Cabinet members to leave the legislature floor.
Photo: CNA
However, the negotiations managed to reach a consensus that the central government’s budget plan for next year be sent to eight legislative committees for review, despite the absence of Jiang’s oral report on the budget plan.
The premier is required to issue the report to the legislatures by the Budget Act (預算法).
The DPP insisted that Jiang apologize for a comment in which he described Wang as “incompetent” and for his appearance at a press conference in which President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) accused Wang of improper lobbying, actions which the party says constitute an infringement of the constitutional separation of powers.
The lobbying accusations led the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to revoke Wang’s membership, sparking a political storm as critics slammed the move as the president’s bid to remove the speaker.
Wang challenged the KMT’s cancelation of his membership in court and won the injunction suit. Wang has been provisionally allowed to keep his KMT membership, as well as his position as a KMT legislator-at-large and legislative speaker.
While Jiang yesterday refused to apologize for his previous comments concerning Wang, an Executive Yuan official said on condition of anonymity that the premier would like to express regret for the disturbances caused by the wiretapping of one of the legislature’s switchboards by the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office Special Investigation Division.
Additional reporting by Shih Hsiu-chuan
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