A two-day workshop on protecting the safety and rights of top-level whistle-blowers opened yesterday in Taipei, hosted by the Agency Against Corruption.
The workshop was organized by the agency and the Papua New Guinea government to draft regulations that would live up to the spirit of the UN Convention Against Corruption, the agency said.
Officials from Papua New Guinea, the US, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Chile and Japan, as well as Taiwan, are attending the workshop, which includes presentations by officials from the US Office of Special Counsel, the ASEAN CSR network and Transparency International Chinese Taipei.
Photo: Hsieh Chun-lin, Taipei Times
Minister of Justice Chiu Tai-san (邱太三) told attendees that governments should offer personal protection for those whistle-blowers that are brave enough to come forward and reveal potential illegalities.
In his remarks, he referred to how former SinoPac Financial Holdings Co chief executive Michael Chang (張晉源) was removed from seven company positions after his alleged involvement in alleged violations of the Securities Exchange Act (證券交易法) by former SinoPac chairman Ho Shou-chuan (何壽川) became known.
Ho is suspected of authorizing NT$5 billion (US$164 million) in questionable loans to Sun Power, whose chairman is related to Ho’s wife, Chang Hsing-ju (張杏如). The loans extended were made without sufficient collateral, which allegedly violated the limitations on transactions between interested parties.
The Witness Protection Act (證人保護法) or clauses on maintaining confidential information under the Code of Criminal Procedure (刑事訴訟法) serve to protect these individuals, but the nation lacks a comprehensive framework to offer whistle-blowers more protection, the agency said.
Whistle-blowers are increasingly important as the nation has witnessed multiple incidents of corruption cases involving the business sector, the agency said.
An effective and friendly system that offers strong protection will encourage more people to come forward the agency said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift