The Green Party-Social Democratic Party Alliance (Green-SDP) yesterday accused President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of violating the Criminal Code by arranging to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) tomorrow and called on the High Prosecutors’ Office to bar Ma from leaving the nation while the charges are investigated.
“We do not oppose a meeting between cross-strait leaders, but we are here today to fight for procedural justice,” alliance legislative candidate Lee Yen-jong (李晏榕), an attorney, told a press conference outside the High Prosecutors’ Office before the group submitted their charges.
Lee said Ma’s negotiation of the meeting with Xi violated three articles of the Criminal Code: illegally entering into a compact with a foreign government, violating one’s commission to protect national interests while conducting foreign affairs and conspiring to cede national territory to a foreign power.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
Ma’s entering into a “compact” to hold the meeting was illegal because he did not consult the Legislative Yuan before agreeing to the meeting, she said, adding that previous rulings by the Council of Grand Justices state that cross-strait sovereignty issues constitute a “major matter” that is subject to Legislative Yuan approval and supervision under the Constitution.
Ma violated his commission to conduct foreign affairs by keeping negotiations over the meeting a secret from members of the public, she said.
The meeting would also endanger national territory if it were conducted under a “one China” framework as expected, she said.
Lee called on the prosecutors’ office to bar Ma from leaving the country, and arrest him at the airport if he insists on departing for the meeting.
Such a restriction is warranted under the Immigration Act (入出國及移民法) for suspects of ongoing investigations, she said.
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