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.
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