The Taipei High Administrative Court yesterday rejected an appeal by two women against the Taipei City Government’s refusal to approve their marriage.
Liang Tzung-huei (梁宗慧) and Chu Pei-shuan (朱珮諠) filed the appeal after their request to register as a married couple was rejected by the Household Registration Office in Taipei’s Zhongzheng District in 2014.
The couple asked the court to overturn the decision by the registration office and validate their marriage.
Even though the Council of Grand Justices in May ruled that the Civil Code’s current definition of marriage is unconstitutional and requested that the Legislative Yuan amend the law within two years, the court could not grant the request on the grounds that it does not have the authority to pressure household registration offices into recognizing such marriages, it said in a statement.
The ruling was made because the legal framework for same-sex marriage has not been promulgated into law and the two-year deadline has yet to be reached, the statement said.
Liang and Chu said they would appeal the decision.
The couple were among 30 same-sex couples who in August 2014 went to city offices to apply for legal recognition of their marriages.
After they were turned down, three of the couples decided to take further legal action in 2015.
Hearings for Liang and Chu’s case began in April 2015, but was suspended to await the results of a constitutional interpretation regarding the legality of laws prohibiting same-sex marriage.
In October, a case filed by another same-sex couple — Fang Min (方敏) and Lin Yu-li (林于立) — to register their marriage was also rejected by the court.
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