The Taiwan Association of University Professors called for government records to be accessible for “reasonable use,” saying administrative arbitrariness and overinterpretation of the Personal Information Protection Act (個人資料保護法) have either made the Archives Act (檔案法) meaningless or violated it.
The truth about the past and transitional justice rely on an open government archive, but government agencies have excessive administrative discretion over whether the records should be made public, and regulations protecting personal information make information inacessible, the association said.
Taking the changes to high-school curriculum guidelines as an example, the association said: “The related documents, after the guidelines were made public, have all become government records, and information that should be open to examination and research. However, the reality is that the involved parties, researchers and even legislators could not access the records, making evaluation impossible, which actually contradicts the Archives Act.”
A signature drive has been launched to call for government action on making government records more accessible and as of May, more than 400 people have signed the petition, including 94 history professors, 47 professors in other disciplines, 96 graduate students, 15 secondary and elementary-school teachers and 14 history and law experts.
According to the Archives Act, if the Legislative Yuan has not approved a delay in the publication, “national archives shall be accessed for utilization no later than 30 years after creation.”
“We are asking the government to automatically declassify records after 30 years,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of Taiwan History Hsueh Hua-yuan (薛化元) said.
REDACTION
“Records concerning transitional justice should be exempt from being redacted ‘on the basis of the public interest’ under the the Personal Information Protection Act.” Hsueh said. “And the data concerning the execution of public affairs by civil servants or people employed by government agencies, such as informers, should not be protected by the act either.”
National Dong Hwa University associate history professor Chen Chin-ching (陳進金) said open access to the archive is only the first step toward transitional justice.
“But now we do not even have the files needed to make history known. Without an open archive, transitional justice is a non-starter,” he said.
The petition also demands that unclassified documents be accessible to the public and are not pulled from the shelves on the pretext of the protection of personal information protection, and that what has been declassified should not be resealed.
A history researcher at the press conference shared his experience of encountering resealed government archives on certain sensitive issues.
“I’ve done research on the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) dispute and published articles on it. I have been told by my fellow researchers that the related files, cited in my dissertation, were then made unavailable to researchers,” Academia Sinica postdoctoral fellow Jen Tien-hao (任天豪) said.
Hsueh said the campaigners do not seek to blame low-level public servants, who have excessive discretion over the redaction and declassification of documents due to the lack of clear-cut regulations, but call on the government to make its stance on an open archive clear by making transparency-friendly interpretations of existing laws.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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