The Nationality Act (國籍法) should be revised to remove provisions that allow the citizenship of naturalized foreign spouses to be revoked, rights campaigners said yesterday, adding that a clearly defined citizenship revocation cut-off period was lacking.
Members of the Labor Rights Association, Legal Aid Foundation, TransAsia Sisterhood Taiwan and other groups gathered at the Legislative Yuan to announce the establishment of the “Article 19 Alliance,” named after regulations that say naturalization cannot be revoked after a five-year statute of limitations.
The exemption was passed last year among amendments to expedite the citizenship process, including giving foreign spouses up to a year after gaining Republic of China (ROC) citizenship to renounce other citizenships.
Photo: Lu Yi-hsuan, Taipei Times
“The way changes were made has created a situation in which foreign spouses live in fear because they are never given a definitive residency guarantee,” Labor Rights Association executive director Wang Chuan-ping (王娟萍) said.
“If a marriage is found to have been faked, there is currently no statute of limitations to declare it null, but this should be detached from the citizenship issue,” said Frank Wu (吳富凱), a Legal Aid Foundation attorney, citing legal requirements that foreign citizens renounce past citizenships as part of the naturalization process.
“It is reasonable for there to be provisions allowing for the revocation of citizenship when new information comes to light, but there should be a clear time limit,” Wu said.
“The problem with the article is that these people give up their citizenships,” National Chengchi University associate professor of law Bruce Liao (廖元豪) said. “When they apply, the government found no problems with their application, but after a couple years, it can still revoke citizenship because of minor paperwork issues, effectively making the foreign spouses stateless.”
Ly Vuoch-heang (李佩香), a Cambodian immigrant and executive secretary of TransAsia Sisterhood Taiwan, said that spouses face major obstacles if they seek to recover citizenship in their home countries.
There is a backlog of more than 80 foreign spouses from Vietnam who have had their ROC citizenship revoked, with the Vietnamese government only restoring citizenship to two individuals each year, Ly said.
“There are lots of ways that you can punish falsification, including fines, but revoking citizenship is completely disproportionate,” she said, adding that Taiwanese spouses in falsified marriages are only subject to fines, creating incentives for disgruntled spouses to make false accusations rather than pursuing a formal divorce.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching