Mainland Affairs Council Minister Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) was urged by eight Chinese human rights lawyers, academics and activists to take up the issue of a Chinese human rights attorney with his counterpart when they meet in Kinmen this weekend.
Wang should lodge serious concerns about the situation of Chinese human rights lawyers to China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍), the Taiwan for Chinese Rights Defense Lawyers Network said in a statement.
Attached to the statement was a list of eight Chinese lawyers whom the group said were deprived of personal liberty for remarks they made or cases they took to address social injustice.
Among the names was 43-year-old Tang Jingling (唐荊陵), a prominent Guangzhou-based lawyer who took on cases related to land grabs, counterfeit vaccinations and corruption before he was arrested in May last year on charges of inciting subversion of state power.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the Mainland Affairs Council have repeatedly said that the universal values of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law constitute important elements in cross-strait relations and that they would let Beijing know the arrests are of concern to Taiwan, the group said.
“However, we have not seen Wang address these issues at the first two meetings he had with Zhang,” the group said, calling on Wang to urge China to release the eight Chinese lawyers and to enforce judicial human rights.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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