The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) citation of the National Security Act (國家安全法) as grounds for arresting four New Party Youth Corps members on Tuesday has had a chilling effect on society and goes against its previous views on the act, which it opposed when it was in opposition, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus said yesterday.
“When the DPP was an opposition party, it opposed the introduction of the act, saying it would grant prosecutors and investigators excessive power and abet White Terror,” KMT caucus deputy secretary-general Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) told a news conference at the legislature in Taipei.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office and the Investigation Bureau citing the act when arresting the New Party members just because they hold different political views constitutes “green terror,” Lee said.
“Thirty years after martial law was lifted, the DPP wants to reintroduce martial law,” KMT Legislator Alex Fai (費鴻泰) said, referring to the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例) and a bill proposed by the Cabinet on improving information and communication security, which includes provisions that would grant the government more power when probing documents from the nation’s authoritarian era when safeguarding information security.
KMT Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) accused the DPP of applying double standards when considering people who support unification between Taiwan and China and those who advocate for Taiwanese independence.
Taipei prosecutor Lin Chun-ting (林俊廷) and bureau officers barged into the homes of the four sleeping men and arrested them like they were the Ming emperor’s royal guards tasked with quashing dissent, Lai said.
The reason behind Tuesday’s arrests was indelicate, he said, urging people to condemn the DPP over the incident lest the party infringes on their basic rights.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) blasted prosecutors’ arrest of the New Party members and the raids of their homes, saying that such actions run counter to the spirit of the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice, which was passed by the legislature on Dec. 5.
The purpose of pushing for transitional justice is to redress past judicial or political injustices, Wu said.
“That the prosecutors’ disproportionate treatment of the party members and blatant violations of their human rights happened shortly after the passage of the act is the bill’s greatest irony,” he said.
In response, DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) dismissed the KMT’s criticism as “irrelevant,” as the articles opposed by the DPP were removed from the National Security Act.
Article 2, which prohibited people from forming political groups and rallying, and Article 3, which restricted people’s freedom to travel abroad, were abolished in 2011 as per constitutional interpretations No. 445 and No. 644, Ker said.
The National Security Act has been the only act that addresses Chinese spies and their collaborators since 1991, when the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion (動員戡亂時期臨時條款) was abolished, he said.
Following the abolition of the temporary provisions, Chinese Communist Party members were no longer defined as part of a “foreign regime” or a “rebel group,” so articles 2-1 and 5-1 of the National Security Act were introduced to ban people from spying for “China or foreign nations,” he said.
The KMT’s remarks were aimed at creating chaos, as without the National Security Act, there would be no legal channel to deal with Chinese spies, which is doubtfully what the KMT wants, Ker said.
Additional reporting by Stacy Hsu
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