Social Democratic Party (SDP) legislative candidate Lu Hsin-chieh (呂欣潔) went to Taipei’s Zhongzheng District Household Registration Office yesterday with her partner to register their same-sex partnership under a new measure the city has adopted.
The Taipei City Government has allowed for the registration of gay couples since Wednesday last week, becoming the second area in the nation to recognize such relationships after Kaohsiung.
If both partners have their household registered in Taipei, a gay couple can register their partnership at their respective district household registration offices.
Photo: EPA
However, the registration is not legally binding, but rather a symbolic record in the government’s household registration system of the partnership.
Under the regulations, a consent form allowing access to personal information is also signed, in which the signatory can choose to allow medical institutions, social welfare institutions or police access to the partnership registration information.
Under the terms of the consent form, registered partners are given some rights in emergencies, for example, the legal ability to sign consent forms for surgery in the absence of the patient’s relatives.
Lu said they still felt like “second-class citizens,” since the partner’s name is not put on national identity documents — as is the case for heterosexual partnerships — and the institutions concerned still have to go through “extra procedures” to confirm the partnership in case of emergency.
The registration does not solve other problems concerning the rights of spouses such as property division and inheritance, Lu said.
She also lashed out at the stalling of the marriage equality bill in the legislature and the Ministry of Justice’s passive obstruction to the passage of the bill.
Miao Poya (苗博雅), an openly gay SDP legislative candidate, said the registration granted by the city governments is far from a comprehensive protection of gay people’s legal rights.
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