Protest regulations should be revised to remove unreasonable restrictions and reduce police discretion, civic groups said yesterday.
“The Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法) was fundamentally passed in hopes of preventing people from taking to the streets,” said Assembly and Parade Act Amendment Alliance member Chou Yu-hsiu (周宇修), a lawyer.
“The law was originally titled the ‘Assembly and Parade Act for the Period of the Suppression of the Communist Rebellion’ when it was passed, and the title was changed only after martial law was lifted,” he said.
While provisions of the law had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Judicial Yuan last year, the legislature has yet to pass revisions, he said, calling for requirements that demonstrators “apply” to protest be amended to only require “notification.”
While large demonstrations rarely run into difficulties because of the weight of public opinion, small protests on less well-known issues face many restrictions under the act, along with related portions of the Social Order Maintenance Act (SOMA, 社會秩序維護法) and the Criminal Code, he said.
Alliance member Hsu Jen-shou (許仁碩) — a Taiwan Association for Human Rights legal specialist — said that police have shifted toward using SOMA and the Criminal Code to regulate protests, as judges have increasingly struck down lawsuits based on the Assembly and Parade Act.
“Protests should not be viewed as preparation for committing a crime,” he said, calling for the curbing of police discretion to decide protest “red lines.”
Alliance member Lin Ching-how (林靖豪) said that broad police discretion enabled them to use lawsuits to increase the cost of protests, citing “loose” regulations forbidding “obstruction of the execution of public duties,” allowing the arrest of demonstrators sitting in silent protest.
The groups said that police often target protesters who deliver speeches for arrest and prosecution, seeking to “kill a chicken to scare the monkeys” — a Mandarin idiom for making an example out of someone to scare others.
The unwillingness of public prosecutors to take cases against police officers makes its difficult to collect evidence in case of police misconduct, Hsu said, adding that it is often difficult to identify the responsible officers.
The groups also criticized as “unfair” and “undemocratic” requirements that activists post hefty deposits for “road usage” as part of protest applications, saying that the requirement gives an advantage to corporations, which can easily afford to “purchase” “road usage” rights near their offices to block protests.
“The protection of protest rights is a class question,” Taiwan Higher Education Union head organizer Lin Por-yee (林柏儀) said. “Big corporations do not need protest marches because all they have to do to work things out is pick up the phone.”
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS