The Legislative Yuan’s constitutional amendment committee yesterday met for the first time, electing its five conveners and setting an objective to complete proposals, such as lowering the voting age, by next year.
The meeting comes after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) made their own proposals for constitutional amendments following the nine-in-one local elections in November last year.
With 38 lawmakers taking part, the committee elected the KMT’s Lu Hsueh-chang (呂學樟), Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) and Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), as well as the DPP’s Cheng Li-chun (鄭麗君) and Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) as its conveners.
The conveners immediately met and reached agreements to hold two public hearings on constitutional issues per week — starting on April 9 — for five consecutive weeks, hoping to finish amendment drafts by mid-June so that they can be voted on in a referendum on January 16 next year when the legislative and presidential elections are due, Cheng told reporters after the meeting.
However Lu said that it would be a “difficult job to come up with amendment drafts by mid-June, since different parties have different ideas on different issues.”
“We’re under tremendous pressure,” he said.
The KMT hopes to pass amendments to improve the parliamentary system, enabling the legislature to choose the premier, while the DPP hopes to lower the threshold for amending the Constitution as well as increase the number of seats in the legislature.
Both parties agree that the legal age for voting should be lowered from 20 to 18.
“We suggest a two-phase constitutional amendment process, so that we can put non-controversial amendment proposals, such as lowering the voting age, to referendum first and then take time to negotiate other issues,” Lee said.
Meanwhile, Taiwan Solidarity Union caucus whip Lai Chen-chang (賴振昌) accused the two major parties of overlooking the smaller parties after he was not chosen as a convener.
“Constitutional reform last time, which was also led by the two major parties, was criticized for overlooking the voices of the smaller parties,” Lai said.
“It’s the same situation again this time,” Lai added.
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
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater