The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) commitment to protecting the rights of foreign spouses will be measured by the legislation they prepare, not by the special committees they establish, advocacy groups said yesterday, calling for the elimination of discriminatory standards against Chinese.
About 30 people gathered outside the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, shouting slogans demanding that foreign spouses not be treated as “flower vases” — a Mandarin idiom for something decorative but useless — in response to the DPP’s and the KMT’s establishment of internal party committees last month to address problems faced by the nation’s “new residents.”
“Whether the new committees are flower vases will be understood when the parties express concern for real issues,” National Chengchi University associate law professor Bruce Liao (廖元豪) said, criticizing the requirement that Chinese spouses wait six years before they can apply for a Republic of China identity card, compared with three years for spouses from other nations.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
“The reason spouses are required to wait before applying for an identity card is to give them time to settle down and adjust to life here, but [Chinese] spouses do not face a language barrier and can adjust more quickly than other spouses, so what reason is there for the longer waiting time other than political animosity?” Liao said. “We want them to love Taiwan, but our actions are telling them that Taiwan does not love them back.”
Cross-Strait Marriage Harmony Promotion Association chairman Chung Chin-ming (鍾錦明) said that recent legislative amendments had not shortened waiting times, but added new requirements.
Advocates also criticized the requirement that foreign spouses from many Southeast Asian nations pass Ministry of Foreign Affairs interviews before being allowed into the nation.
Labor Rights Association executive director Wang Chuan-ping (王娟萍) said that 30 percent of the spouses interviewed by the ministry in 2015 failed their interviews and their marriages were not officially recognized.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs makes its own decisions and foreign spouses are not given an avenue of appeal,” said TransAsia Sisterhood Taiwan executive secretary Ly Vuoch-heang (李佩香), who is an immigrant from Cambodia, adding that the ministry has dragged its feet in changing the procedures after being censured by the Control Yuan in 2009.
The Control Yuan ruled that the ministry violated basic human rights by denying rejected foreign spouses the right to appeal.
“We do not see how they have made any progress,” Ly said, adding that the ministry only last year held a hearing on the issue.
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