The long-awaited National Land Planning Act (國土計畫法) was cleared by the Legislative Yuan on Friday, stipulating that a national land-use zoning and planning act should be formulated in the near future and rezoning would be strictly restricted to curb the loss of farmland and natural reserves.
One of the so-called three national land acts, the act’s passage came 22 years after it was first drafted in 1993 and the act would require central and local governments to zone the nation’s land into four categories — national reserve areas, marine resource areas, agriculture development areas and urban development areas.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiu Wen-yen (邱文彥), who proposed the act, said that the act was formulated in response to large-scale disasters, such as the 921 Earthquake in 1999 and Typhoon Morakot in 2009 to design a land-appropriate national development plan to prevent similar disasters.
“I promised to have the act passed, and I did it today. It should be a comfort to disaster victims,” Chiu said.
Once the land categorization is announced, rezoning is only possible during an overall zoning review, which is held once every five years by local governments and once every 10 years by the central government, while individual rezoning applications would be prohibited, which is aimed at preventing land expropriation and property speculation through land category alternations.
The act would replace the existing Regional Planning Act (區域計畫法) once a national zoning plan is promulgated.
The act gives the central government the authority to enforce a proposed zoning plan over local government plans.
The right of Taiwanese to take legal action is codified in the act, which would require governments to bear the cost of any legal proceedings initiated by citizens whose interests are damaged due to a failure to enforce the act.
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods