Taiwan and the Netherlands yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a working holiday scheme.
Speaking at a press event in Taipei yesterday, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Secretary-General James Lee (李光章) and Dutch Representative to Taiwan Guy Wittich said they hoped that young people from the two nations would be able to form close bonds.
The MOU makes Taiwan the seventh country or territory that the Netherlands is issuing working-holiday visas to, and the third in Asia following South Korea and Hong Kong.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The Netherlands is the 17th country with which Taiwan has such an arrangement, and the 12th in Europe.
Lee began pushing for a working-holiday scheme while he was representative to the Netherlands a few years ago.
Under the MOU, both countries would issue 100 working-holiday visas annually to applicants aged 18 to 30.
Under the arrangement, Taiwanese could apply for one-year visas, while Dutch nationals could apply for a 180-day visa that could be extended once for an additional 180 days.
The Dutch representative office said that it would formally announce application procedures and the date on which applications would start being accepted after both sides work out the final details.
Wittich, who first came to Taiwan 35 years ago to participate in a summer camp run by the China Youth Corps and National Chengchi University, said he hopes that through the program, young people could become ambassadors of relations between the two countries.
The relationship between the two countries has been growing stronger over the past few years, and the Netherlands has been the largest source of foreign direct investment in Taiwan every year since 2016, Wittich said, adding that it is also Taiwan’s second-largest trading partner in Europe, with annual trade exceeding NT$10 billion (US$330.4 million).
A fugitive in a suspected cosmetic surgery fraud case today returned to Taiwan from Canada, after being wanted for six years. Internet celebrity Su Chen-tuan (蘇陳端), known as Lady Nai Nai (貴婦奈奈), and her former boyfriend, plastic surgeon Paul Huang (黃博健), allegedly defrauded clients and friends of about NT$1 billion (US$30.66 million). Su was put on a wanted list in 2019 when she lived in Toronto, Canada, after failing to respond to subpoenas and arrest warrants from the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office. Su arrived at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport at 5am today on an EVA Air flight accompanied by a
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
Restarting the No. 2 reactor at the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant would take up to 18 months, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said today. Kuo was answering questions during a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Economics Committee, where legislators are considering amendments to the Renewable Energy Development Act (再生能源發展條) amid concerns about the consequences of the Pingtung County reactor’s decommissioning scheduled for May 17. Its decommissioning is to mark the end of Taiwan’s nuclear power production. However, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers have proposed an amendment to the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of existing
RSS