The Legislative Yuan was to clear all legislation that has bipartisan consensus by midnight this morning after the last day of the current session yesterday.
The legislature spent most of yesterday clearing bills in its final meeting before the end of this plenary session.
A total of 82 items of legislation were scheduled to pass their second and third readings in the meeting, with reviews continuing late into the evening. Cross-party negotiation earlier this week scheduled the meeting to continue until midnight.
Items passed yesterday included the budget for the first phase of the central government’s flood-control project, amounting to about NT$12.65 billion (US$421.8 million), with NT$3.32 billion to be raised by taking out loans this year and the other NT$9.33 billion from loans next year.
Amendments to the Gender Equality in Employment Act (性別工作平等法) and to the Criminal Code (刑法) were also passed.
The amendments to the Gender Equality in Employment Act are to raise fines and make public the personal and corporate identities of violators. The revisions are also intended to extend the law’s protection to interns and dispatch workers.
While the existing Criminal Code stipulates that a person who “kidnaps another to extort ransom shall be sentenced to death, life imprisonment or imprisonment for not less than seven years” and that “if aggravated injury results from the offense, the offender shall be sentenced to death, life imprisonment, or imprisonment for not less than 10 years,” the amendments made yesterday scrapped the capital punishment from these two clauses.
The bill was proposed by the Executive Yuan, who referred in its proposal to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was ratified by Taiwan in 2009 and says that in countries that have not abolished the death penalty, “the sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes in accordance with the law in force at the time of the commission of the crime and not contrary to the provisions of the present Covenant and to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
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