Three legal advocacy organizations that won this year’s Tang Prize for their significant contributions to the rule of law yesterday discussed the challenges they face in tackling economic, environmental and political issues.
At the Tang Prize Masters’ Forum in Rule of Law, representatives from the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA), Colombia-based Dejusticia and Lebanon-based The Legal Agenda addressed an audience in Taipei through videoconferencing.
Syeda Rizwana Hasan, chief executive of BELA, which promotes environmental justice and the development of sound environmental jurisprudence, said that her organization faces challenges from international financial institutions, large corporations and the government.
Photo: CNA
“Corporate interests often take over public interests, and the state loses its entity as a regulator and sides so much with the corporation that you can’t really differentiate which one is the state and which one is the corporation,” she said.
These interests greatly impact non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as 430 environmental and human rights defenders in Bangladesh were killed last year while fighting against mining projects or defending the rights of indigenous communities, Hasan said.
“Authoritarian regimes are increasingly branding NGOs as foreign agents, enemies of the state and anti-development elements. They are trying to criminalize our entity and our functioning, they are trying to seize powers so they can assess our performances and delicense us if we go against their developmental narratives,” Hasan said.
Rodrigo Uprimny Yepes is cofounder of Dejusticia, which is focused on rule of law issues such as racial and sex discrimination.
He said that many NGOs must find a way to obtain financial stability without losing their independence.
Samer Ghamroun, a cofounder and board member of The Legal Agenda, which promotes judiciary independence and the defense of vulnerable groups, said that although religious equality is guaranteed in Lebanon, many other individual rights are not.
“So religious equality coexists with social economic inequalities, huge social economical inquiries and lack of respect for individual rights,” Ghamroun said.
Yeh Jiunn-rong (葉俊榮), a professor at National Taiwan University and chair of the Tang Prize selection committee for the rule of law, moderated the forum, which was organized by the Tang Prize Foundation and the university’s College of Law.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater