The legislature on Friday passed amendments to the Organized Crime Prevention Act (組織犯罪防制條例) to include fraud syndicates, lawmakers said.
The act now defines a “criminal organization” as a group of three or more people using “coercion, fraud or blackmail to commit crimes with the characteristics of continuity and profitability, which is punishable by a maximum of five years in jail.”
Organized criminal groups were defined as “collective” in nature, but groups do not necessarily have to be “properly named or have codes and ceremonies, unchanged residences, habitual participation of members or clear division of labor,” as defined by the act prior to the amendment.
According to the Executive Yuan, since the law was promulgated in 1996 no major amendments have been made to it despite “the rise of a new type of organized criminal group that are more disguised, indirect and multi-layered.”
Indicted instigators, principals, controllers or commanders of a criminal organization can be sentenced to between three and 10 years in jail and a fine of no less than NT$100 million (US$3.3 million), and participants can be sentenced to between six months and five years in jail and a fine of no less than NT$10 million.
Those who recruit people to join organized criminal groups can be sentenced to between six months and five years in jail and a fine of up to NT$10 million, while adults recruiting those under 18 years old can be sentenced to up to one-and-a-half times the penalties for recruitment.
People recruiting by using threats, violence or other forms of coercion could be sentenced to between one and seven years in jail and a maximum fine of NT$20 million, according to the amended law.
The Executive Yuan said that the amended law can punish fraud rings in tandem with the Criminal Code according to Article 339-4, which stipulates that offenses by dissemination of false information to the public through the Internet and other electronic methods are punishable by between one and seven years in jail.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods