Officials from the Ministry of Justice’s Agency of Corrections yesterday denied media reports that a group of judicial representatives from Taiwan was downgraded to a “regional government level” while attending a cross-strait forum in China last year.
A government source familiar with the handling of cross-strait issues and negotiations was yesterday quoted by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) as saying that the Chinese government forced the Taiwanese delegates to group together along with visiting delegations from Hong Kong, Macau and China’s Fujian Province.
The delegates were participating in meetings and field visits during the Cross-Strait Correctional Institutions Practice Forum in November last year.
At past forums, Taiwanese delegates formed their own group as representatives of Taiwan’s Agency of Corrections, according to the source quoted in the report. However, this time the Chinese government allegedly downgraded the Taiwanese, saying the visiting officials were from a regional government.
It resulted in the Taiwanese delegates being brought into a collective group of “Hong Kong, Macau, Fujian and Taiwan” for the forum and visits to correctional institutions and prison facilities in several Chinese cities, the source said.
According to the report, the Taiwanese delegates objected by saying it was inappropriate to be placed into such a grouping and that the group would be too large for the scheduled visits.
Despite the objections, Chinese officials told them the visiting itinerary would not be the same for all the delegations, and went ahead with the arrangement.
Agency of Corrections Deputy Director Chiu Hung-chi (邱鴻基) yesterday denied the allegations.
“There were discussions on issues of managing correctional institutions. On field visits, each group had their own itinerary, and only if the scheduled visits coincided would all the groups go together,” he said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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