People claiming to have been subjected to police brutality during the Sunflower movement yesterday said the government had perverted the judicial system and demanded state compensation for medical bills.
Lawyers for people who claim they were beaten up on March 23 and 24 last year during an attempt to occupy the Executive Yuan said that “prosecutors are trying to crush the Sunflowers.”
“They are manipulating judicial power to repress people’s freedom, to silence the voice of democracy activists,” lawyer Chen Ta-cheng (陳達成) said at a press conference in Taipei yesterday.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
“The prosecutors chose to indict these activists for taking part in the Sunflower movement, but there have been no charges laid against police for attacking peaceful protesters with brutal means, and no charge yet against then-premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) for giving the order,” Chen said.
Chen is representing 75-year-old activist Chou Jung-tsung (周榮宗), who says he was beaten by police officers during the Executive Yuan occupation, leaving him with a bruised body and damage to internal organs that have kept him in hospital till now.
Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) Legislator Chou Ni-an (周倪安) said she went to the Executive Yuan on the night of March 23 intending to protect Sunflower movement protesters from a potential police crackdown.
However, she was among people who were attacked by police, she said, adding that the action left her with head injuries, contusions to her face and impaired vision, requiring hospitalization for a number of weeks.
“Government officials are still covering up what happened,” Chou said yesterday. “[Prosecutors] do not know which police officer assaulted me that night, yet they are laying charges against the protesters who conducted a peaceful sit-in and were not carrying any weapons.”
She called on people to file for state compensation over police brutality during the Sunflower movement, inviting people to bring injury reports and hospital bills to her office for help with the process.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office on Tuesday laid charges against 119 people in connection with the Sunflower movement protests, including Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆), Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷), Dennis Wei (魏揚), Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) and Tsay Ting-kuei (蔡丁貴).
Others include Lynn Miles, a political activist from the US who played a role in advancing Taiwan’s human rights cause during the Martial Law era, along with Canadian photojournalist David Smith, who published Hello, Taiwan (台灣, 你好) last year, a book about his media experience and his love of the nation’s people and landscape.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching