The Executive Yuan needs to refine its draft anti-stalking act to broaden the range of pestering behavior covered and shorten the specified time frame for police investigations into complaints, women’s rights groups said yesterday.
While they support the idea of the bill, they said its current version would not provide enough protection to people who are being harassed or stalked.
Lawmakers on the legislature’s Internal Administration and Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene committees yesterday questioned Ministry of the Interior officials over the draft approved by the Executive Yuan.
Photo: Huang Yao-cheng, Taipei Times
The draft defines “pestering behavior” as a person’s actions toward others, be it a specific individual or their families, spouses or those have close relations with them, out of “admiration, affection or resentment” cause the focus of the attention to feel disgusted or fearful.
The draft act lists seven types of pestering behavior: spying; stalking; repeatedly making telephone calls or sending messages to a person on a withheld number; persistently requesting dates; sending or exhibiting messages, images, sound, videos or other things to a person; menacing a person by showing things that could hurt their reputation; or using contact information to purchase unsolicited and unwanted items for a person.
If someone is being stalked by a stranger, they can hardly know and therefore prove the stalker’s motivation, Awakening Foundation director of development Lin Shiou-yi (林秀怡) told a news conference at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei.
Once a person files a complaint with police, the police are required to spend three months investigating the allegations, which is both time consuming and fails to provide a victim with timely protection, Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation deputy chief executive Jasmine Bai (白智芳) said.
Police should finish a preliminary investigation into a complaint within 72 hours, and if the allegations are confirmed, they should issue a 10-day protection order that forbids a harasser from pestering the complainant during that time, she said.
However, Deputy Minister of the Interior Chiu Chang-yueh (邱昌嶽) told lawmakers during yesterday’s committee session that victims would not need to verify their harasser’s motivation before contacting police, because the police would start probing a case as soon as they received a victim’s complaint.
Police would first give a warning to the alleged harasser, and if the harasser is found to be pestering the complainant again within two years, police would ask the court for a protection order for the victim, he said.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) urged the ministry to allow police to issue a 10-day protection order to curb alleged harassers.
However, Chiu said that the suggestion could face legal issues and so it would need further consideration.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS