Human rights issues should never be put to a vote, a visiting human rights advocate said yesterday, adding that the passage of three referendums on LGBT rights on Nov. 24 was comparable to laws passed in Nazi Germany.
In his opening address at the International Forum on Freedom and Democracy in Taipei, Bruce Knotts, executive director of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s UN office, a non-governmental organization (NGO), said that such issues “should never be put to a vote as Taiwan has just done with regard to same-sex couples.”
The Constitution guarantees the rights of same-sex couples to marriage equality, but Protestant Christian churches in Taiwan organized referendums in opposition to an interpretation issued by the Council of Grand Justices, Knotts said.
Photo: Lu Yi-hsuan, Taipei Times
“This is called democracy because it asks for a democratic process to rule on whether a group of people should enjoy equal protection under the law or not?” he asked, adding that in 1930s Germany, the Nuremberg Laws that stripped citizens identified as Jewish of their civil rights were also passed by a parliamentary vote.
“The road to the death camps started with the trappings of populist democracy,” he said.
Knotts’ remarks came after Taiwanese voted on four questions related to LGBT rights, including a question defending the Civil Code’s definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, which was backed by 72.5 percent of voters who cast a ballot, while another on protecting the rights of same-sex couples through legislation other than amendments to marriage laws in the Civil Code passed with 61.1 percent support.
The third question, against including homosexuality in gender education at schools, was supported by 67.4 percent of ballots cast.
Two other proposals, submitted by LGBT rights advocates, were rejected by similarly large margins.
Those two proposals called for the Civil Code to be amended to allow same-sex marriage and for the inclusion of education on gender equality, including subjects related to homosexuality, in school curriculums.
The council in May last year ruled that the definition of marriage in the Civil Code was unconstitutional and ordered that legislation be passed within two years to allow marriage between “two people,” not just a man and a woman.
If such regulations are not enacted within two years, same-sex couples are to be allowed to marry under the law by the same process as laid out in the Civil Code, the council said.
The one-day forum was organized by the World League for Freedom and Democracy.
The league is a Taipei-based international non-governmental organization that evolved from the Anti-Communist League and was initiated by Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines in 1954.
It was renamed in 1990 in an effort to adjust to “global political realities and to attract more people to the freedom and democracy movement.”
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