After the Ministry of the Interior convened a review committee on Friday afternoon to decide to ban the controversial Japanese cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi (小林善紀) from visiting Taiwan, some expressed their bewilderment without any hesitation.
"Might people begin to associate Taiwan with Iran, which tried to mobilize the Muslim world to assassinate [Salman] Rushdie?" asked a diplomat posted in Japan.
Kobayashi may not need to find his life under threat like Rushdie, author of the controversial novel The Satanic Verses which prompted the Iranian government to impose a sentence of death on the author and triggered a furor in the Muslim world. But what puzzled outsiders in Kobayashi's case was the mechanism at play behind the decision, with some demanding the government make the whole process transparent.
In fact, article 17 of the two-year-old Immigration Law (入出國及移民法) is the legal basis for the interior ministry to convene the review committee, which should consist of related government agencies as well as people who are not officials -- deemed "generally recognized impartial people" in the regulations.
But despite the legal basis, critics lashed out at the officials' insistence in keeping confidential names of non-officials attending the discussion.
"What do you mean by `generally recognized impartial people?' You can have all sorts of people, and the list of these non-officials could be very selective," said Chin Heng-wei (金恆煒), editor in chief of Contemporary Monthly.
"The government should have listed these names, otherwise people may see the decision-making process as a product of political trickery (權謀)," Chin added.
Indeed, when Taiwan was still under the grip of martial law, the mechanism that produced the list of the island's persona non grata was blurred and hazy, controlled mostly in the hands of the country's secret police as well as other related national security agencies. "In the past its operation was secretive," recalled 76-year-old retired ambassador Loh I-cheng (陸以正).
But when the then KMT-led government began lifting bans on exiled Taiwan dissidents in the 1990s and the island gradually democratized, calls for establishing a transparent mechanism to review the listing of persona non grata emerged.
"In the past we had the so-called `blacklist.' Now it's a requirement to have this review process," said Tseng Wen-chang (曾文昌), Commissioner of the Bureau of Immigration under the interior ministry.
But even so, the process leading up to the committee's decision on Friday afternoon remained unclear.
Sources told the Taipei Times that 10 out of the committee's 11 members attended the discussion on Friday, including six officials and four non-officials.
Officials attending the meeting came from the bureau of immigration and the national police administration under the interior ministry, the foreign ministry's bureau of consular affairs, the Ministry of Justice, and the National Security Bureau.
The four non-officials consisted of a representative from the Chinese Association for Human Rights (中國人權 協會) and a local lawyers' association (律師公會), a professor of law, and a professor of public administration, an insider said.
In fact, although Article 17 details various circumstances under which an alien could be banned from entering Taiwan, it is only when aliens are "believed to endanger national interests, public security, public order, or the good customs of the state" that the related committee needs to convene to discuss the case, as stipulated in Item 13 of Article 17.
"The ministry doesn't need to organize the committee for a discussion under circumstances such as an aliens' overstay, lack of a required visa, or having a criminal record in Taiwan or another country," said Tseng.
Since the law was implemented in May of 1999, the United Daily News reported yesterday that the review committee only discussed three cases under Item 13, but officials declined to confirm the figure and to offer any information on related precedents.
"The nature of the meeting is confidential," Chien Tai-lang (
Some officials and observers said any country has its list of persona non grata, and the establishment of the list is "an exercise of a sovereign act" that sometimes stems from reasons unacceptable to the individuals concerned.
"For instance, the fact that former president Lee Teng-hui's (李登輝) plan to visit the US has met with obstruction from the US government shows that the US' denial of his entry is for political considerations," said a commentator, who refused to be named.
But in the case of Kobayashi, some urged the current DPP government not to repeat a similar fiasco staged by the KMT-led government three years ago regarding the denial of the entry of Nobel Peace Laureate Dr Jose Ramos-Horta.
"The government received misinformation from the Indonesian government which described him as a terrorist, and thus decided to deny his entry [for several hours]. Then by the time the government turned around to describe him as a respected figure and decided to allow him to enter Taiwan, he felt insulted and decided not to enter the country," said DPP Legislator Parris Chang (
Even a foreign ministry official described that episode three years ago as "embarrassing."
"The whole thing brought disgrace on our country because it showed that the related agencies inside the government failed to think through the decision thoroughly," said the official under condition of anonymity.
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