A coalition of civil groups yesterday called for the immediate release of human rights advocate Lee Ming-che (李明哲) and urged the government to continue pressuring China on the issue, after an application by Lee’s wife, Lee Ching-yu (李凈瑜), to visit her husband was rejected by the Chinese government earlier this month.
“It has been exactly one year since Lee was sentenced to prison and we urge the Taiwanese government to continue taking measures to demand his release,” Taiwan Association for Human Rights secretary-general Chiu Ee-ling (邱伊翎) told a Taipei news conference jointly held by the association, Amnesty International, Covenants Watch and other groups.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) should use the Dec. 20 twin-city forum between Taipei and Shanghai as an opportunity to lodge a protest with Beijing over the way Chinese authorities arbitrarily transferred Lee to different prisons and denied visitation rights to his family members, she said.
Photo: Chen Chih-chu, Taipei Times
The groups have previously called on the Taiwanese delegation to the APEC summit to demand Lee’s release when meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) earlier this month, but the delegation did not mention anything about Lee throughout the summit, Chiu added.
Lee was on Nov. 28 last year sentenced to five years in prison for “subversion of state power” after holding online lectures on democracy and helping families of jailed dissidents in China.
He was arrested in March last year when entering China from Macau, and yesterday was the 619th day of his detention, Chiu said.
Authorities had allowed Lee’s family to visit him five times since March, but have stopped allowing visits since September, she said.
In October, the family received indirect information that Lee had been transferred to another prison, although no explanation was given, she said, adding: “There is absolutely no information about him at the moment and that raises concerns about his well-being.”
Chiu also mentioned a referendum that sought to change the national team’s name from “Chinese Taipei” to “Taiwan,” which was rejected on Saturday.
“Many foreign media outlets have interpreted the election results as an indication that Taiwan is leaning toward China, but we are here today to show that Taiwanese will defend their freedom of speech and human rights, that we will not approve of Beijing’s values and disregard for human rights,” she said.
Her view was echoed by Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女), who vowed to continue voicing support for Lee and calling for his release “until the day he is freed.”
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