Anxiety is high in the LGBT community ahead of planned negotiations in the legislature today to reconcile three draft bills on same-sex relationships.
The conclusions reached by the review of the three proposals are to be put to a vote at the Legislative Yuan on Friday, with the result determining the rights, obligations and levels of protection same-sex couples would be entitled to if they register a legal union after Friday next week. That is the deadline imposed by the Council of Grand Justices in 2017 in its Interpretation No. 748 for resolving the issue after it ruled that the Civil Code’s prohibition of unions between people of the same sex was unconstitutional and called for a legislative remedy within two years.
The LGBT community worries that the provisions stipulated in the Executive Yuan’s draft could be compromised in the negotiations, Marriage Equality Coalition Taiwan deputy coordinator Joyce Deng (鄧筑媛) said.
“Even the Executive Yuan’s version only barely meets our minimum standards in terms of the rights and level of protection it affords, as it merely allows a partner to adopt the other’s biological children, but not their non-biological ones,” Deng said.
Deng said that gay couples’ rights could be further undermined if lawmakers support the version proposed by Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Tai-hua (林岱樺), which includes clauses that would allow either spouse’s family members or relatives within three degrees of kinship to request an annulment of a union under the pretext of preventing sham unions.
The LGBT community also worries that some clauses in the bill submitted by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆), which was drafted by anti-gay groups, could also be adopted, she said.
Meanwhile, Tseng Hsien-ying (曾獻瑩) of the Coalition for the Happiness of Our Next Generation said that the government was apparently attempting to ignore the opinions of the majority of Taiwanese, referring to Referendum No. 12 in November last year in which voters supported initiatives that opposed same-sex marriage.
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:
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