The Taipei City Government is mulling the inclusion of same-sex couples’ visitation rights and signing of consent forms for their partners in hospitals in an effort to formalize the municipality’s adoption of the same-sex couples registration addendum.
The addendum, while holding no legal power and recognized only at the municipal level, allows the registration of same-sex couples at municipal household registration offices as partners and giving them hospital visitation rights, as well as recognizing their signing of consent forms for surgery on their partners.
However, same-sex rights groups on March 8 last year said that while the rights were “technically” granted, there was difficulty in implementation due to the addendum’s lack of legal recognition.
The groups said that while gay people were able to sign medical documents for their partners, immediate family still took priority over partners in the eye of the law.
The municipality’s gender equality office said it is mulling cooperation with the department of health to promote recognition of same-sex couples by including same-sex visitation rights as a mandated inspection item beginning in the latter half of this year.
The department’s division of medical affairs director Ho Shu-an (何叔安) said that the division has not received any complaints from hospitals on the issue, adding that the division is in full cooperation and has listed the issue as one of the mandated inspections for this year’s hospital inspections.
“We expect the full implementation of same-sex partners’ visitation rights by all the hospitals in the city by the second half of the year,” Ho said.
Currently, the legal definition of marriage is one between “a man and a woman,” according to the Ministry of Justice, but the Taipei government has already filed a request for a constitutional interpretation of the matter.
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
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,