Minister of Justice Lo Ying-shay (羅瑩雪) yesterday embarked on a historic five-day visit to China, where she is scheduled to speak at a college of law, among other activities.
Lo is the first Taiwanese minister of justice to visit China in an official capacity.
She was invited by China’s Supreme People’s Court chief prosecutor Cao Jiangmin (曹建明) when Cao visited Taiwan last year.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
After receiving instructions from President Ma Ing-jeou (馬英九) and consulting with the legislature’s major political parties, Lo told China that she would accept the invitation “under conditions of equality and respect,” the Ministry of Justice said yesterday in a news release.
Lo is to attend a meeting in Beijing with Cao and other high-ranking Chinese officials in charge of liaising with Taiwan over legal issues, the ministry said.
Lo is to give a talk on Taiwan’s judicial reforms at China’s National Prosecutors’ College in Beijing and attend an academic conference at East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, where she is to have talks with China-based Taiwanese businesspeople on their legal needs, the ministry said.
Lo is scheduled to return to Taiwan on Friday.
Lo would be able to contribute to China’s legal reforms by sharing Taiwan’s experience and facilitating cross-strait exchanges over legal issues, the ministry said.
Taiwan’s “advanced experience in the rule of law,” with regard to “striking a balance between strictness and clemency in criminal policy,” compensation packages for victims of crime, and the Administrative Enforcement Agency’s “justice and care” doctrine would be of benefit to China, it added.
However, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) yesterday accused Lo of taking advantage of the trip to evade questions from lawmakers at a session of the Legislative Yuan, adding that the visit is poorly timed because controversy over the death penalty has been raised over the decapitation of a four-year-old girl in Taipei yesterday.
“The public expects Lo to make statements on this issue, but where is the minister of justice?” Wang said.
Wang added that Taiwan and China’s legal systems are incompatible, which calls into question the productivity of attempting to make “exchanges between democracy and totalitarianism.”
Even if Lo had achieved “Nobel Prize-worthy” breakthroughs, there would be no room for implementing any policy changes during the remainder of Ma’s term, Wang said, deriding the visit as “a recreational graduation trip.”
Wang vowed that DPP lawmakers would make Lo explain the purpose of her visit to China upon her return.
Additional reporting by CNA
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B