Lawmakers yesterday clashed over supervisory articles governing negotiations with China during a question-and-answer session with Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Minister Katharine Chang (張小月) at the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee.
“I feel that the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] is not taking a sincere swing at this issue,” said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator William Tseng (曾銘宗), who, as committee coconvener, has scheduled a review of draft bills to begin tomorrow.
The MAC’s and the DPP caucus’ positions on the urgency of the review are contradictory, he said, questioning whether the council and the caucus were playing “good cop, bad cop” on the issue.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
“Even though the council says it attaches great importance to the issue, you have unbelievably refused to put forth your own version of the articles,” he said. “Your own draft version of the articles is supposed to stake out your position, strategy and policy direction, but you have not done any of this. Is that not strange?”
“I do not see the council taking any real action, other than coming here to read from a script,” KMT Legislator Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順) said.
Rebutting the allegations, Chang said: “I take a different view because we have consistently maintained that we hope the legislature can pass supervisory articles guaranteeing openness, transparency and civic participation.”
“We will not present our own version because we support the DPP caucus’ version,” she said, adding it would be inappropriate for the council to present a draft on how the legislature should supervise negotiations conducted by the council.
“As an executive body, all we would end up doing is insisting on our administrative autonomy, while the legislature is concerned with its right to supervise,” she said.
“At this stage, the supervisory articles are not an urgent issue, because of the overall state of cross-strait relations,” said DPP Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智), who serves as the committee’s DPP coconvener.
“It is not that the council does not want to hold discussions or that the DPP does not want to hold a review, but the reality is that it is going to be a while before this kind of law would actually be put to use,” he said.
The trade in services agreement has been shelved due to domestic controversy and there is little space for renegotiation because China has refused to contact President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration, he said.
Passage of supervisory articles was a key demand of the Sunflower movement, which saw student activists occupy the legislature in 2014 to protest the agreement negotiated by the then-KMT government.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the