Veteran political activist Shih Ming-te (施明德) yesterday spoke out in favor of same-sex marriage and gay rights in a Facebook post, saying that if he were elected president next year, his government would allow same-sex marriage and give gay couples the same rights as heterosexual couples.
According to the constitution, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights passed by the legislature in 2009 are considered domestic statutes, Shih said.
That means the government could promulgate same-sex marriage without the need for the Legislative Yuan to pass any new bills, Shih said.
The 74-year-old Shih announced on Thursday that he would run in January’s presidential election as an independent.
One of the nation’s longest-serving political prisoners, Shih was a founding member of the Democratic Progressive Party and served as its chairman for two years before resigning from the party in 2000.
He was one of the leaders of an anti-corruption campaign against then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in 2006.
Shih’s wife, Chen Chia-chun (陳嘉君), who is the executive director of the Shih Ming-te Culture Foundation, moderated discussions between lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LBGT) rights activists and legislators last year.
The Legislative Yuan reviewed a same-sex marriage bill in December last year, the first time a bill to legalize same-sex marriage had ever been reviewed at the parliamentary level in East Asia, but the bill stalled because of opposition from the Ministry of Justice and religious groups and remains shelved in 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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