Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers yesterday called on members of the Transitional Justice Commission to resign en masse and for the commission’s operations to be suspended.
Chang Tien-chin (張天欽) resigned on Wednesday as commission deputy chairman after the Chinese-language Mirror Media magazine published a partial transcript of a commission meeting on Aug. 24, in which he was heard proposing an investigation of New Taipei City mayoral candidate Hou You-yi (侯友宜) to influence public opinion and compared the commission to Dong Chang (東廠), a Ming Dynasty secret police and spy agency.
The commission should be suspended and the Control Yuan and prosecutors should initiate investigations, KMT Legislator Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) told a news conference in Taipei.
Photo: Chien Li-chung, Taipei Times
Political interference has permeated the government at all levels, and people like Chang are causing distress to ordinary civil servants, Chiang said, adding that the Taichung City Government is making civil servants work on political campaigns.
“Chang might be a black sheep, but the entire commission was rotten to begin with,” he said.
Chang’s case is not an isolated incident and proceedings should begin to hold officials mentioned in the transcript accountable, including Central Election Commission members and lawmakers, KMT caucus secretary-general William Tseng (曾銘宗) said.
Someone in the Presidential Office, the Cabinet or the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) must be giving orders to Chang, he said, adding that they should be identified and held accountable.
The KMT caucus will demand the creation of a multi-agency task force to investigate the incident when the Legislative Yuan starts its next session and will ask the Taipei Prosecutors’ Office to file criminal charges, he said.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Premier William Lai (賴清德) should take political responsibility for appointing Chang, Tseng said.
The commission is mainly composed of people in Tsai’s circle when she served as Mainland Affairs Council chairperson, and Chang was empowered to make the inappropriate comments due to his connection to Tsai, KMT Legislator Ko Chih-en (柯志恩) said.
“This kind of transitional justice is not credible. The Transitional Justice Commission itself needs some transitioning,” she said.
Asked to comment, Executive Yuan spokeswoman Kolas Yotaka said: “Chang’s remarks are unacceptable, harmful to the Transitional Justice Commission and damaging to the government’s reputation.”
The Cabinet has urged the commission to review its conduct and take the incident as a salutary example of what not to do, she said.
The Cabinet has not yet received Chang’s resignation and a replacement is to be chosen after it has consulted Transitional Justice Commission Chairman Huang Huang-hsiung (黃煌雄), she said.
While the Executive Yuan strongly condemns Chang’s remarks, changing all commission members would necessitate new nomination and confirmation hearings in the legislature, she said.
“I believe that starting again from scratch and reshuffling the commission would be complicated and difficult,” she said.
The commission is an independent agency and the Executive Yuan respects its autonomy, she said, adding that the Cabinet is confident that lawmakers would do their job in providing checks and balances.
Additional reporting by Lee Hsin-fang
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,