The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday defended its decision not to raise its travel advisory for Thailand’s capital, until Tuesday, saying it has been closely monitoring the situation in Bangkok following Monday evening’s explosion near a popular shrine.
“Decisions on travel advisory levels to be issued for a particular area are based on the ministry’s guidelines and a comprehensive assessment of all the relevant factors,” ministry spokesperson Eleanor Wang (王珮玲) said.
Such an alert is merely advisory in nature and there is no direct relationship between an alert and any contracts the public might have signed with travel agencies, Wang said.
Some Taiwanese who have booked trips to Bangkok have complained that the late upgrade of the travel alert has hindered their appeals to travel agencies to have their tickets refunded.
The ministry maintained its yellow travel advisory for Bangkok — which advises travelers to exercise caution and to review the need to travel to the affected area — in the first 24 hours after a blast killed at least 20 people and injured more than 120 others.
The ministry upgraded to an orange alert — the second-highest in its four-color alert system — for the city late on Tuesday evening. An orange advisory warns travelers to exercise caution and to avoid traveling to the affected areas if possible.
Wang said the ministry had many consultations with the Tourism Bureau over the establishment of a set of standardized criteria for the refund of fees for bookings by tourists planning to travel as part of a tour group.
“If such criteria were in place, the public would have a clearer basis for applying for a refund” Wang said.
She added that the personal and property safety of travelers were the ministry’s primary concerns, dismissing accusations of a slow response.
According to Article 28-1 of the Standardized Contract for Overseas Tours (國外旅遊定型化契約書範本), a contract can be canceled in the event that, prior to departure, there is a real and recognized risk to tourists’ life, limb, health or property in one of the scheduled destinations of the tour.
However, the party canceling the contract should pay compensation of no more than 5 percent of the tour price to the other party.
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