Lawmakers yesterday approved amendments to the February 28 Incident Disposition and Compensation Act (二二八事件處理及賠償條例), extending the time frame for victims or their families to apply for compensation by four years until May 23, 2021.
“Considering that some victims of the 228 Incident have not yet applied for compensation, the time frame during which 228 victims and their families are allowed to apply for monetary compensation should be duly extended,” the amendment proposed by the Executive Yuan said.
Yesterday’s extension is the sixth one, after the time frame was prolonged in 1997, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2013.
With this month’s passage of the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例) expected to shed light on recent discoveries of potential 228 victims, as well as government archives and political files, the amendment aims to safeguard the rights of victims and their families, and redress the oppression they suffered in 1947 under the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime.
The amendment extends the scope of people entitled to compensation to include family members of 228 victims.
The wording stipulating that people who have become “handicapped” as a result of the 228 Incident are entitled to compensation was also amended, and the provision now reads “people who have suffered injuries or disabilities,” to bring the act’s wording closer in line with the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Executive Yuan said.
With investigations into the incident still ongoing, some victims or their families have not come forward to apply for compensation, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女) said.
KMT Legislator Sufin Siluko had proposed an amendment stipulating that owners of properties that were occupied by the then-KMT administration should be compensated.
His draft was voted down by the DPP caucus, which instead proposed a supplementary resolution requiring the Ministry of the Interior to ascertain public properties that have been seized of confiscated during the 228 Incident and to publish a report within two months.
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:
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