President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) announced 11 Control Yuan member nominees to replace those who failed to earn legislative approval at the end of July, but the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday denounced the list as “an unnecessary disturbance.”
Ma revealed the new nominees on Wednesday, calling the process to fill the remaining spaces in the institution “a duty that the president — responsible for the normal operation of the nation’s constitutional institutions — could not shrug off.”
Ma said that with just 18 Control Yuan members, the institution would not be able to function normally, as it could only review an impeachment case once. Since such cases require second reviews, the institution’s power of impeachment against public servants would be restricted, he said.
The nomination list includes Council of Hakka Affairs Minister Chung Wan-mei (鍾萬梅); Control Yuan Deputy Secretary-General Hsu Hai-chuan (許海泉); National Cheng-chi University Department of Diplomacy professor Chu Hsin-min (朱新民); National Sun Yat-sen University political science professor Liao Da-chi (廖達琪); Taipei Mission to the Republic of Latvia representative and former National Security Council deputy secretary-general Gary Ko (葛光越); and World Economics Society public policy think tank president Bert Lim (林建山).
Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), head of a seven-member recommendation review committee, said the latest nominations are to supplement the Control Yuan with experts from several principal fields. None has a criminal record, Wu said, adding that “all of them have clean backgrounds.”
DPP spokesperson Huang Di-ying (黃帝穎) yesterday expressed the party’s disapproval of Ma’s move, calling the renominations “an unnecessary disturbance to the existing constitutional conflict [about the utility and need for the institution].”
“The president has not uttered a word of apology for the social disruption caused by his earlier nominations, who were vetoed by the legislature. It is simply perverse for him to again urge the legislature’s cooperation,” Huang said.
He added that the government had continued to work fine while the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) boycotted then-president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) nominations for the Control Yuan from 2004 to 2008.
“And while there were 29 Control Yuan members, nominated by Ma in 2009, for the last term, the impeachment attempts against former prosecutor-general Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘), who has been found guilty of leaking confidential information to the president about an — at the time — ongoing investigation, and Keelung Mayor Chang Tong-rong (張通榮), sentenced on charges of influence-peddling, both failed,” Huang Di-ying added, saying that it shows that the dysfunctional nature of the institution lies not with the number of the members, but with Ma’s nominations.
The latest roster is also not without controversy, Huang Di-ying added.
“Chu and Liao, both former Referendum Review Committee members, have been dubbed ‘referendum killers.’ And Bert Lim once called for a constitutional amendment to extend the presidential term limit from eight years to 10 years — as it is done in China — and extolled authoritarian government for its ‘efficiency and productivity,’” he said.
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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