Bureaucratic red tape has been known to cause annoyance for many people, but for 51-year-old Lai Ming-teh (賴明德) it has meant being stuck in a non-marriage for more than a decade.
A former fisherman from Pingtung County, Lai married a South African woman 10 years ago on a fishing trip to the country. The couple got married in Cape Town in April 1996 and registered their marriage in South Africa.
Lai said because of his lack of legal knowledge, when he brought his bride back to Taiwan he only registered her as his legal spouse with his local household registration office. He did not apply for permanent residency or start his wife on the naturalization process.
PHOTO: LEE LI-FA, TAIPEI TIMES
Seven months after they returned to Taiwan, Lai’s wife went back to South Africa and he has since lost contact with her.
In the last 10 years, Lai has sought various ways to file for a divorce, but because of a lack of paperwork and without the consent of the wife, the courts have been reluctant to grant it to him.
Lai’s married status, to a woman still of a legally recognized working age, has disqualified him from receiving low-income subsidies despite his being unemployed for a long period of time.
The illiterate Lai said he thought about going to South Africa to look for his wife, but when he called his wife’s home, the number had been disconnected.
Many people have encouraged Lai to remarry, but that is also impossible as according to government records he is still legally married.
The court has not been able to serve his wife legal papers because Lai was not able to provide a current address.
An immigration officer helped him by seeking assistance from the Bureau of Consular Affairs (BOCA) to retrieve the documents his wife used when she entered the country in 1996, but after six months of waiting, BOCA said it was not able to help because Lai’s case was not a consular affair.
As the household registration office requires little information from foreign nationals married to Taiwanese, this often presents difficulties for people wanting to file for divorce.
The Pingtung office said although the law requires foreign nationals who want to marry a Taiwanese citizen to present a wedding certificate notarized by a Republic of China embassy or representative office of the country in which they were married, many neglected to do so.
Many people only fill in the name, age and nationality of their spouse, but neglect to provide other information.
Even if the paperwork has been filled out completely, it was still difficult to verify the information, the office said.
Liao Wen-chung (賴文忠) of the Pingtung Family Court said there have been cases where a husband has successfully divorced his wife while she was living abroad because the court failed to verify her address overseas, which resulted in her not receiving a summons.
Liao said in Lai’s case, the judge was not able to grant a divorce, but if the related government agencies exhausted all means of finding his wife, the judge could “compassionately” end his marriage.
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