The Executive Yuan yesterday said it opposes the proposed amendments to the Referendum Act (公民投票法) passed by the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee on Wednesday.
The Internal Administration Committee reviewed and passed dozens of draft amendments to the Referendum Act on Wednesday, including changing the referendum-proposal first threshold from 0.5 percent of total voters in the previous presidential election to 0.01 percent, lowering the second threshold from 5 percent to 1 percent, revising the rule requiring 50 percent of eligible voters to participate for a referendum to a simple majority and the abolition of the Referendum Review Committee.
The committee passed the amendments, after a 13-hour review, without the participation of most of the committee’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators, who had withdrawn from the review earlier that day in protest against what they said were unreasonable negotiation methods employed by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and demonstrators outside the Legislative Yuan calling for the amendments, which the KMT lawmakers said made them “feel threatened.”
The amendments reviewed and passed by the committee are to be handed over to the legislative floor for second and third readings, before they are certain to be put to cross-party negotiations.
The Executive Yuan yesterday said that it “expects” that the amendments will be “redeliberated and sufficiently discussed in the cross-party negotiations, lest the core idea of the design of a referendum system — which is meant to complement representative democracy, resolve major controversies and protect the people’s rights to referendums — be distorted.”
It said that the amendments “are against the idea of referendum design and have run afoul of the principle of majority rule in democracies.”
“Revising the passage threshold to a simple majority could lead to a negative result that sees the nation’s major policies decided by a minority of voters, which means that the rights of the majority of people could be unreasonably determined by the minority,” the Cabinet said. “It violates majority rule and strains the democratic legitimacy and effect of the referendum.”
The Cabinet also said the significant lowering of the referendum-proposing and signature thresholds would render referendums too easy to hold. A reduction of the proposing threshold to 0.3 percent would be acceptable, the Executive Yuan said, urging that the second-phase signature drive be maintained at 5 percent. The Cabinet also opposed the abolition of the Referendum Review Committee.
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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