The Supreme Administrative Court yesterday ruled that former Taiwan Provincial Government secretary for foreign affairs Kuo Kuan-ying (郭冠英) would not be deprived of his pension.
Kuo applied for the post and was accepted in March 2014 by the now-abolished Provincial Government Office.
The provincial government was accused of opening a back door for Kuo, as he did not have to go through a personal interview and scored the lowest in a pre-employment test.
The job secured Kuo a government pension after just four months, which he would have lost as he had not worked for the government since 2009 after being dismissed from his position as director of the information division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Toronto in 2009.
The court upheld a previous ruling by the Taipei High Administrative Court, which said that interviews were the purview of government agencies.
As the lack of a personal interview was not an isolated case, the Ministry of Civil Service should process Kuo’s retirement and begin paying his pension, the Taipei High Administrative Court ruled.
The ministry appealed, but the Supreme Administrative Court’s ruling yesterday said Kuo is eligible for a monthly pension of NT$60,000.
Yesterday’s ruling was final.
Kuo’s dismissal from the Canadian office was due to comments he made in 2009 using a pseudonym, Fan Lan-chin (范蘭欽), referring to himself as a “high-class Mainlander” and calling ethnic Taiwanese “taibazi (台巴子, Taiwanese rednecks).”
The Control Yuan issued a notice of correction to the ministry regarding the pension Kuo was to receive and the ministry contacted the Ministry of Justice to ascertain whether regulations of the Administrative Procedure Law (行政程序法) applied.
The civil service ministry last year said that Kuo’s employment with the provincial government was made null after the justice ministry said that the act was inapplicable.
The decision meant Kuo was ineligible for the pension.
Kuo filed a complaint with the Civil Service Protection and Training Commission, which denied his claim, prompting Kuo to file an administrative suit against the civil service ministry.
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
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
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