The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday expressed concern over what it called an “unfriendly” act by Spain to deport a group of Taiwanese telecom fraud suspects to China.
The ministry said it would summon Spain’s representative to Taiwan a second time to reiterate its stance on the issue and inform the representative of its intention “to review the existing bilateral cooperation and interaction in a strict manner.”
The Spanish government agreed to a request from Beijing to deport 269 Taiwanese and Chinese suspects arrested for their alleged involvement in telecom fraud to China, the ministry said.
The decision has infringed upon the rights of the Taiwanese and defies the European value of humanism, it said in a statement on Saturday.
Taipei yesterday criticized the Spanish government for ignoring the nationality principle, which says that a sovereign nation can adopt criminal laws that govern the conduct of its nationals even while outside of its borders.
The ministry expressed regret that Spanish authorities deported the Taiwanese suspects to China and strongly condemned the action.
The suspects were arrested in December last year in a joint operation between Spain and China, the ministry said, adding that more than 200 of the suspects are Taiwanese.
Over the past two months, the government has held negotiations with Spain in the hope that the Taiwanese suspects can be sent back to Taiwan for investigation and trial, the ministry said.
The ministry last month summoned Spain’s Representative to Taiwan Jose Luis Echaniz Cobas and explained the government’s stance on the issue, asking for the deportation of the Taiwanese to Taiwan based on the nationality principle.
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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