Taiwanese legal associations and human rights groups yesterday accused the Chinese Supreme People’s Procuratorate of turning a blind eye to abuses against human rights lawyers.
“It’s not just that China does not meet international standards — it does not even measure up to its own standards in its criminal code,” Taiwanese Lawyers Network for the Support of Chinese Human Rights deputy convener John Wei (魏千峰) said in Taipei.
The Chinese Supreme People’s Procuratorate earlier this week rejected a petition by several relatives of lawyers, which called for it to file charges against the security services and prosecutors over legal breaches in their handling of the lawyers’ cases.
Many Chinese lawyers have been arrested since July last year as part of an official crackdown on the “rights protection” movement.
“According to the criminal code, you are supposed to allow the relatives hire a lawyer when someone is arrested, but what has actually happened is that no one knows where the lawyers are, or the family’s lawyer is not permitted to speak with them, or the government requires that they be represented by a government-appointed attorney,” Wei said.
Family members have also been put under surveillance or house arrest in violation of the criminal code, he said.
Activists showed a video in which the wives of arrested lawyers Li Heping (李和平), Xie Yanyi (謝燕益) and Wang Quanzhang (王全璋) said they had been forced to move house and threatened that their children would not be allowed to attend school.
“Only a government which has no faith in itself would resort to these kinds of methods,” said Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女), who chairs the legislature’s human rights caucus, accusing the Chinese government of putting pressure on family members to compensate for the weakness of its criminal charges.
Taipei Bar Association human rights committee chairman Wang Lung-kuan (王龍寬) said the Chinese government this month announced amendments to the regulations governing legal firms, requiring them to curb the activities of any “rights protection” lawyers they employ.
“They have now moved beyond the courtroom to seek total control over what lawyers can do, banning them from supporting protests or signing petitions,” Wang said.
Wei said that China is unique in revoking the licenses of lawyers who become the subject of official displeasure.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS