Civic groups yesterday urged the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to put the interests of the public ahead of the party’s interests in its proposals for constitutional reform by dropping controversial issues to meet the deadline for a referendum on amendments to the Constitution to be held in tandem with January’s elections.
The KMT has treated the issue of constitutional reform as a “commodity” that it has “haggled over” to further its own interests, Taiwan Association of University Professors vice president Lin Hsiu-hsin (林秀幸) told a news conference yesterday.
If amendments to the Constitution are to be voted on through a referendum alongside with the combined presidential and legislative elections on Jan. 16 — a required step of the procedure for amending the Constitution — the legislature has to pass the proposed amendments before Tuesday.
“We hope that the KMT refrains from tying its proposals to those highly supported by the public, because doing so will only drag down the reforms,” Lin said.
The KMT has placed higher priority on reinstating the legislature’s rights to confirm the president’s choice of premier and legislating absentee voting into the Constitution in its proposed constitutional amendments, although it also agrees to the issues which civil groups consider essential to fostering a strong civil society.
They are that the voting age be lowered from 20 to 18, that the threshold for parties to name legislators-at-large be reduced from 5 percent of total party votes to 3 percent and that the threshold for constitutional amendments be eased.
Economic Democracy Union director Lai Chung-chiang (賴中強) questioned the KMT’s assertion that the restoration of the legislature’s rights to confirm the appointment of premier is supported by more than 67 percent of the public.
The poll cited by the KMT to justify its proposal also found that 55.9 percent of respondents supported the current presidential system of government, rather than changing to a parliamentary one, Lai said, adding that the contradictory findings of the survey cast doubt on its reliability.
“It’s a reflection of defeatism within the KMT toward the presidential election. What the KMT has planned in restoring the legislature’s confirmation rights is to usurp the rights of a Democractic Progressive Party president,” Lai said.
Allen Houng (洪裕宏), a professor at National Yang-Ming University’s Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, said that the groups did not oppose an amendment for absentee voting, but had concerns over the approximately 1 million Taiwanese businesspeople and families being given the right of absentee voting.
It would only lead to the nation’s election results being manipulated by absentee ballots cast in China if the principle of a secret ballot and freedom from external influence cannot be upheld during the absentee voting process, Houng said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift