The New Power Party (NPP) yesterday put forward six referendum topics regarding sovereignty and labor rights, including sensitive proposals dealing with the nation’s territory and official name, and said it would conduct an online poll to decide which two of the six topics the party should advocate to propose for a referendum.
Four of the topics fall within the category of sovereignty: whether the president should convene a “citizens’ constitutional convention” to draft a new constitution, which would need to be approved by referendum; whether Taiwan should seek to compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics under the name “Taiwan”; whether the government should define the country’s territory as “Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu and other islets”; and whether the English name “Republic of China” should be removed from Taiwanese passports.
In the labor rights category, the party proposed two questions: whether the Legislative Yuan should pass a “national holiday act” to ensure a minimum of 19 national holidays each year for public and private employees and whether it should pass a “minimum wage act” that guarantees the minimum income needed to sustain the basic living needs of employees and their families.
Photo: CNA
The NPP invited the public to vote on the six proposals on its Web site from yesterday to Thursday, saying it would initiate the referendum process for the most favored topic in each of the two categories and expects to submit the two referendum proposals to the Central Election Commission next month at the earliest.
The NPP’s proposals followed the passage of an amendment to the Referendum Act (公民投票法) that lowers the thresholds for initiating, seconding and passing referendums.
“[The proposal] to establish a ‘citizens’ constitutional convention’ is in line with the essence of Sunflower movement, which called for a convention to draft a constitution appropriate to Taiwan through a bottom-up decisionmaking process,” NPP Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said
Redefining the nation’s territory is crucial to help Taiwan assert its sovereignty and would have a positive effect on policymaking and budgeting, Huang said.
The NPP’s proposals have been criticized as being in conflict with the amendment, which rules out territorial changes and constitutional amendments as viable referendum topics.
Huang said that even though the party would touch on the issue of the nation’s territory and official name, none of the issues would require any changes to the Constitution.
The Democratic Progressive Party described the act as a procedural bill regulating how referendum processes should be carried out, not what topics the public can vote on, Huang said, adding that the NPP believes the public has the right to vote on the six topics.
“How could a purely procedural bill deprive citizens of the power to vote on those issues?” NPP Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said, calling on the commission to uphold the values of democracy when the NPP initiates the referendum processes.
While same-sex marriage opponents have reportedly planned to launch a referendum on the issue, Huang said that basic human rights cannot be put to vote and a referendum could not override the constitutional interpretation in May that found the statutory ban on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, Huang said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS