A move to lower the nation’s voting age from 20 to 18 was backed yesterday by Minister of the Interior Chen Wei-zen (陳威仁), although such a change would require amending the Constitution, which could be a drawn-out process.
During the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee meeting, Chen said that lowering the voting age was a good concept because it would allow young people to take part in politics earlier.
The ministry held a discussion on the issue in 2011 and most experts and lawmakers attending the meeting were in favor of lowering the voting age, Chen said.
The participants believed the matter should be dealt with by amending the Constitution, he said.
Central Election Commission vice chairman Liu Yi-chou (劉義周) expressed a similar view at the committee meeting.
They were responding to a proposal by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Ting Shou-chung (丁守中) to lower the voting age. Ting’s office said there were about 640,000 people in the 18-to-19 age group as of the end of March.
In other developments, the committee yesterday passed a preliminary review of an amendment to the Nationality Act (國籍法) that would bar Taiwanese nationals who hold permanent residency in another country from assuming public office.
The proposed amendment, introduced by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Pan Meng-an (潘孟安) and fellow lawmakers, also stated that public officeholders must take steps to renounce their permanent residency in other countries before their inauguration and provide evidence that they have renounced their permanent residency within one year of their inauguration.
Under the current law, only nationals who concurrently hold citizenship from another country are barred from public office.
KMT Legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇), who has previously proposed similar bills on this matter, said that barring those holding permanent residency from assuming public office would help ease public doubts about allegiance.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift