By Loa Iok-sin Staff Reporter
Three Chinese democracy activists living in Taiwan climbed over the wall at the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) in Taipei yesterday in an attempt to seek political asylum.
Cai Lujun (蔡陸軍) and Wu Yalin (吳亞林) climbed into the AIT compound at around noon yesterday, while another Chinese dissident, Chen Rongli (陳榮利), stood by outside with a video camera.
Cai, who wrote articles in China criticizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was arrested and imprisoned for three years on charges of “inciting subversion of state power.”
After being released from prison in 2006, Cai entered Taiwan illegally to seek asylum, but his request was rejected by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) in July.
Wu said he was jailed in China for nine years for protesting the results of a local election in his native Sichuan Province. Wu had said that the results were rigged by local CCP officials.
After he was warned that he would be sent to a labor camp for distributing pamphlets criticizing the CCP, he escaped to Taiwan through Thailand last December.
Chen was often harassed and watched by police for criticizing the Chinese government and eventually left for Taiwan via Kinmen to seek political asylum. His request was also rejected.
“We climbed over the wall between AIT and a vocational school next door — there was no security guard at all,” Wu told the Taipei Times via telephone after he was escorted out of the AIT compound by police.
“We are trying to seek political asylum from the US because our application for asylum has been rejected by the MAC several times,” Wu said, adding that the MAC told them that their applications were rejected because “there is no law to grant political asylum to anyone in Taiwan.”
After Wu and Cai entered the compound, they expected to be escorted from the premises and arrested immediately. Instead, the waited for two hours without anyone noticing them, they said.
“We stayed inside AIT’s walls for about two hours and then decided to call human rights organizations for help,” Wu said.
Amnesty International Taiwan secretary-general Wang Hsing-chung (王興中) said the men had called the organization.
“After Wu consented to it, I called AIT to notify them” that the men were in the compound, Wang said. “Then we sent a fax to AIT asking it to respect the rights of Cai and Wu and allow them to be accompanied by attorneys if they were to be questioned.”
Wu said AIT officials rejected their request to seek asylum and only asked a few questions about their identities and background before releasing them.
Meanwhile, a MAC official who asked to remain anonymous said Cai and Wu entered Taiwan illegally and fell under the Statute Governing the Relations between the Peoples of the Taiwan Area and Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例).
Although the government cannot grant them asylum, the MAC had been assisting them in seeking political asylum in a third country and seeking help from the UN refugee agency, the official said.
The official said Cai and Wu were spreading false information about the MAC by saying Taiwan had rejected their request for asylum.
AIT yesterday declined to comment.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY KO SHU-LING AND JENNY W. HSU
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