Approved urban land consolidation project reviews should be reopened as part of a rule rewrite, campaigners and residents affected by the projects said yesterday during a protest outside the Ministry of the Interior in Taipei.
About 10 people from Taoyuan City’s Dahu (大湖) and New Taipei City’s Wenzaijun (塭仔圳) areas accused the ministry of failing to address ongoing project proposals for legal changes to protect the rights of individuals.
“We are here to protest ministry officials’ passivity,” said Lin Tzu-chin (林子勤), a member of a self-help association for residents affected by the Dahu project. “They have not responded to our cases and have not said if the new review process will discuss whether the projects are necessary and in the public interest.”
Urban land consolidation aims to spark development by freeing space through the reallocation of plots, but has drawn criticism for low property owner agreement thresholds to win approval, as well as the automatic inclusion of public land regardless of tenants’ wishes.
The Council of Grand Justices last year ruled that some regulations violated procedural justice by failing to ensure that all interested parties meaningfully participate in the drafting stage, with plans to propose legal amendments announced by the ministry last month.
Wang Cheng-chi (王成機), a senior specialist with the ministry’s department of land administration, accepted the protesters’ petition, saying that the ministry intends to address existing projects by amending the regulations on compensation, including removing provisions allowing developers to apply to local governments for demolitions against hold-out residents.
Lin said the proposed change’s effects would be limited because corporations still have legal rights to carry out forced demolitions.
“Compensation is a future matter — what we care about is whether or not our homes can be demolished now, because we were not able to participate in the review of these projects when they were approved,” he said.
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:
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