Immigration authorities yesterday deported two South Korean labor activists after they were arrested during a protest in front of the Presidential Office Building on Wednesday, a move that led other South Korean protesters to launch a hunger strike.
Police pressed charges against Eom Mee-ya and Kong Ji-young over alleged breaches of the Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法), as well as the Social Order Maintenance Act (社會秩序維護法).
Following a night in custody, the two protesters were put on a plane bound for South Korea early yesterday afternoon after immigration authorities ruled that their actions endangered public security.
Nine other South Koreans, representatives of the employees’ union at Hydis Technologies, continued protests outside the residence of Yuen Foong Yu (YFY) Group chairman Ho Shou-chuan (何壽川), where they have been for the past 11 days.
Hydis was acquired in 2008 by Taiwanese e-paper giant E-Ink Holdings (EIH), a YFY Group subsidiary. Despite a string of protests earlier this year the company dismissed more than 300 workers in April.
At a news conference yesterday, two union representatives launched a hunger strike, vowing to continue until Ho engages in talks with the protesters.
Before the hunger strike began, the protesters knelt before a shrine to pay tribute to former Hydis union leader Bae Jae-hyoung, who committed suicide last month.
One of the hunger strike participants, Korean Metal Workers Union regional branch leader Jung Gyu-jun, accused the Presidential Office of “killing Hydis workers again” by refusing to accept a petition from Bae’s widow, Lee Mi-ra, on Wednesday.
“If Taiwanese police insist on deporting our comrades, more supporters will fly in from South Korea to carry on the baton for our campaign,” the other participant in the hunger strike, Hydis union leader Lee Sang-mok, said through an interpreter.
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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