Draft conclusions of the National Congress on Judicial Reform ignore urgent gender equality and children’s rights resolutions, several members of one of the body’s subcommittees said yesterday, promising to boycott a final meeting today over the dropping of their policy recommendations.
The congress, which the Presidential Office tasked with drafting an agenda for comprehensive judicial reform, is drawing to a close after more than six months of meetings and is scheduled to present its conclusions today.
Four members of a subcommittee on “maintaining societal safety” denounced government officials, saying they pushed preset policy proposals when drafting the final agenda for today’s meeting, ignoring the group’s resolutions.
“Simply put, the government feels the congress does not have much valuable advice to offer, so officials decided to just push forward with their original agenda,” said subcommittee member Lai Fang-yu (賴芳玉), a women’s rights advocate and lawyer, adding that she felt “let down” and “ignored” by only a brief mention of “gender-friendly laws” in the final agenda.
Lai said she wrote a more than 30,000-character report detailing possible resolutions, of which the subcommittee passed several.
“I really do not understand how the meeting agenda was drafted. Was it not supposed to respect recommendations by subcommittees?” Lai said, ruling out participating in today’s meeting.
“We spent three months trying to make them listen, what difference will three minutes speaking to the president make?” she added.
“If you only want to reform judicial officials, you should call a national conference on judicial official reform,” National Chiao Tung University law professor Lin Chih-chieh (林志潔) said.
Lin criticized the meeting agenda, saying it failed to address proposals such as the passage of a “rape shield” law and decriminalizing adultery and sexual relations between consenting minors.
“We care about these issues because in our line of work we have found that the criminal justice system lacks perspective when dealing with children and different genders,” Taiwan Healthcare Reform Foundation chief executive Joanne Liu (劉淑瓊) said. “This agenda just confirms that government officials do not have any concept of the importance of these issues.”
The agenda of the original policy conference did not include gender issues, with discussion occurring only after protests, Garden of Hope Foundation chief executive Chi Hui-jung (紀惠容) said.
“Unless the Ministry of Justice says that it will address the gender equality laws we have suggested, what is the point of participating — they have already set the agenda,” Chi said. “Participating would just be a waste of time.”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) today issued a sea warning for Typhoon Fung-wong effective from 5:30pm, while local governments canceled school and work for tomorrow. A land warning is expected to be issued tomorrow morning before it is expected to make landfall on Wednesday, the agency said. Taoyuan, and well as Yilan, Hualien and Penghu counties canceled work and school for tomorrow, as well as mountainous district of Taipei and New Taipei City. For updated information on closures, please visit the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration Web site. As of 5pm today, Fung-wong was about 490km south-southwest of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan's southernmost point.
Tropical Storm Fung-Wong would likely strengthen into a typhoon later today as it continues moving westward across the Pacific before heading in Taiwan’s direction next week, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 8am, Fung-Wong was about 2,190km east-southeast of Cape Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point, moving westward at 25kph and possibly accelerating to 31kph, CWA data showed. The tropical storm is currently over waters east of the Philippines and still far from Taiwan, CWA forecaster Tseng Chao-cheng (曾昭誠) said, adding that it could likely strengthen into a typhoon later in the day. It is forecast to reach the South China Sea
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