A recent legislative review of Council of Grand Justices nominees deserves a “failing grade,” despite some progress, judicial reform groups said yesterday, calling on political parties to allow legislators to vote their conscience in today’s confirmation vote.
“While there was overall progress as legislators were relatively cautious and careful, we still feel that the nomination and review process deserves a failing grade, because it was far removed from the rigorous review we seek,” said Chiu Hei-yuan (瞿海源), convener of the Alliance for Civic Oversight of Council of Grand Justices Nominees.
The decision to separate questioning and review for each of the seven nominees instead of packaging them together represented the greatest progress, Taiwan Association for Human Rights deputy chairman Weng Kuo-yan (翁國彥) said.
“Individual review has at least allowed for each of the nominees to be put to the test, unlike in the past where all the nominees were grouped together, which often resulted in one person becoming the focus of attacks at the expense of the others’ review time,” he said.
However, there is still the need for substantial reform to expand the review process, he said, adding that the agenda of the legislature’s official public hearing on the nominees was limited.
“It felt like there was not even a hearing,” Weng said, adding that almost no legislators attended and the questioning was ill-prepared.
“The legislature’s review process has been like a magic mirror, which reflects legislators more than the nominees themselves,” he said, adding that many legislators’ questions revealed a lack of basic constitutional knowledge, particularly regarding the council’s function and powers.
“Many of the legislators’ questions were completely out of line, there was absolutely no way to make sense of what they were asking,” Weng said, adding that lawmakers should have drafted a review before putting the nominations to a vote.
Taiwan Democracy Watch director Tu Yu-yin (涂予尹) criticized the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus for its refusal to subject nominees to more vigorous review guidelines contained in DPP-sponsored amendments to the Act Governing the Exercise of Legislative Power (立法院職權行使法), instead choosing to keep the amendment in committee after its initial review.
“It is questionable whether this review process fully reflects the content of the reforms they themselves proposed,” he said. “At the very least, the confirmation voting should be opened up to allow legislators to vote their consciences and make sure that the president cannot use her role as DPP chairperson to instruct the legislature how to vote.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater