Chinese asylum seeker Yan Kefen (顏克芬), who had been stuck in limbo at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport for more than seven months, on Sunday arrived in Canada, Radio Free Asia said on Facebook yesterday.
Using his People’s Republic of China passport, Yan on Saturday night departed from the airport and reached Ottawa after transiting through Toronto the next day, the broadcaster said.
Yan and another Chinese national, Liu Xinglian (劉興聯), on Sept. 27 last year arrived at the airport on a flight from Thailand on their way to Beijing, but did not board their scheduled flight to China later that day.
Photo: CNA
Instead, they filed for asylum with local authorities using refugee certificates issued by the UN.
However, Taiwan does not yet have an adequate mechanism to deal with refugee claims, the Mainland Affairs Council said.
Without travel documents that would allow them to enter the nation through normal channels, the two men had to stay in a restricted area at the airport.
The two on Jan. 30 exited Taiwan briefly for “professional exchanges” by flying to an undisclosed country, but returned later that day.
Upon arriving in Ottawa, Yan told the broadcaster that he was grateful to the Taiwanese and Canadian governments, as well as all the people and non-governmental organizations that have helped him.
New School For Democracy chairman Tseng Chien-yuan (曾建元), a guarantor for the two Chinese asylum seekers, confirmed the news, saying that Yan left for Canada after receiving approval for professional immigration to the country.
Liu, 64, who has diabetes and hypertension, must stay in Taiwan for medical treatment, Tseng said.
Council spokesman Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) yesterday declined to comment on the two Chinese asylum seekers.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: