Visiting American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Chairman James Moriarty yesterday said that remarks he made to lawmakers in Taipei earlier this week about a new act introduced to address the legacy of the injustices perpetrated by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in the authoritarian era had been misinterpreted.
Moriarty wanted to clarify the remarks he made during a closed-door meeting on Monday with Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) and several KMT and Democratic Progressive Party legislators, the AIT said.
One of the lawmakers present at the meeting told reporters that Moriarty, the top US official in charge of Taiwan policy, was concerned about how the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例), enacted by the legislature on Dec. 5, would be implemented and that it might cause “desinicization” problems.
Photo: screen grab from Facebook
The AIT yesterday told the Central News Agency via e-mail that Moriarty wanted to set the record straight about what he said regarding the act.
In a statement, Moriarty said that his remarks to legislators earlier this week about the act were “mischaracterized.”
“I did not express concern about the law. I did not criticize the passage or concept of the law,” Moriarty said.
“Rather, I noted that I have heard from Chinese academics, officials and others about something they call ‘desinification’ — which is as horrible-sounding in English as it is in Chinese — and I simply asked the legislators if this issue was considered during the Legislative Yuan debate about the Transitional Justice Act [sic],” he said.
Moriarty arrived in Taiwan on Sunday for a week-long visit that ends today.
It is his third trip to the nation since his appointment as AIT chairman in October last year.
The Act on Promoting Transitional Justice stipulates that the Executive Yuan should establish an ad hoc committee to implement the transitional justice measures set forth under the act.
The measures include publishing political archives, removing authoritarian symbols and reversing miscarriages of justice during the authoritarian era.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods