Bickering over meeting minutes paralyzed a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Internal Administration Committee, with legislators trading barbs over how and whether legislative objections should be recorded.
The meeting was to discuss amendments to the Condominium Administration Act (公寓大廈管理條例), but was derailed after Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順) objected to a motion by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) to amend the minutes of a meeting on Thursday last week to remove a conclusion requiring the Mainland Affairs Council, the Straits Exchange Foundation and other relevant bodies to provide legislators with documentation on recent cross-strait contacts.
“We cannot accept this method of changing meeting minutes, because it would violate legislative rules, especially as this is related to cross-strait relations,” Huang said, adding that the conclusion could only be overturned if legislators present when the conclusion was passed by a consensus moved for it to be considered invalid.
She displayed a comparison of meeting minutes, which purportedly showed that Lee was not present when the conclusion was passed and only raised an objection several minutes later.
“Is a voice recording something you can vote on?” she said, adding that allowing legislators who were not present to challenge consensus conclusions would set a poor precedent.
Huang accused the DPP of using “majority violence” to attempt to keep cross-strait relations opaque.
Lee said he did not oppose requiring government agencies to provide documentation, but added that Huang’s declaration was inaccurate, because legislators had raised objections to the consensus conclusion.
After Huang refused to yield the floor, the committee’s coconvener, DPP Legislator Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), called several committee breaks, which ultimately extended until the conclusion of the committee’s regular meeting time, leaving the fate of Thursday’s meeting minutes undecided.
Chen said Huang was “interfering with legislative business.”
“It is unfortunate that we have had to temporarily halt business for an entire day because of one person’s legislative boycott,” Chen said, accusing Huang of playing games with legislative business.
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