The Taipei District Court announced yesterday that the hearing of Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng’s (王金平) civil suit against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for trying to revoke his party membership was completed yesterday and a ruling would be delivered on March 19.
In the final hearing yesterday, Hsu Ying-chieh (許英傑), one of Wang’s lawyers, told the court that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) had interfered with legislative operations and infringed on the Constitution and jeopardized the government system with his attempt to revoke Wang’s party membership.
Hsu cited KMT regulations as saying: “KMT party membership can be revoked if a member is found guilty in a second trial or if a member’s behavior harms the party’s reputation or the public interest.”
However, Wang was neither charged with criminal offenses, nor was he involved in the alleged improper lobbying case, Hsu said, adding that the KMT’s attempt to revoke his party membership was against the principle of proportionality.
The attorney requested that the court rule in Wang’s favor for the sake of protecting the rule of law and the Constitution.
Wang filed his case on Sept. 11 last year, the day the party revoked his membership over his alleged involvement in improper lobbying of prosecutors to drop an appeal against a not-guilty verdict for Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘).
Losing his KMT membership would effectively end Wang’s 14-year tenure as speaker, as he would lose his seat as a party-appointed legislator-at-large.
Wang was awarded an injunction on Sept. 13 on one of several motions he filed, which allowed him to keep his position in the party until the court decides on the legitimacy of the KMT’s move.
A KMT appeal against that injunction was overruled by the Taiwan High Court on Sept. 30, and the party later announced that it would not make further appeals against the injunction, focusing instead on the court case.
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:
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