An ad hoc Constitutional Amendment Committee that is to consider revisions to the Constitution was inaugurated at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei yesterday following the approval of the list of members.
The caucuses of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the opposition parties on Sept. 14 agreed to set up the committee amid calls for revisions to the Constitution, such as lowering the voting age from 20 to 18.
The 39 members of the committee were named after seats were allotted to parties based on their proportion of seats in the Legislative Yuan. As a result, the DPP has 22 seats, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) 14, the Taiwan People’s Party two and the New Power Party one.
However, the DPP ceded two of its seats to other lawmakers.
One went to independent Legislator Freddy Lim (林昶佐) and the other to Taiwan Statebuilding Party Legislator Chen Po-wei (陳柏惟).
Any proposed constitutional amendments would have to receive the backing of at least one-quarter of the 113 lawmakers to be forwarded to the Procedure Committee, which would then assign them to the Constitutional Amendment Committee for review.
Eleven such amendments were proposed during the most recent legislative session, including lowering the voting age from 20 to 18, and abolishing the Control Yuan and Examination Yuan.
For a proposal to be approved, it must be backed by at least half of the members of the Constitutional Amendment Committee present at a meeting attended by at least one-third of the members.
Should a proposal be passed by the committee, it would then have to be approved by at least three-quarters of the lawmakers at a meeting of the legislature attended by at least three-quarters of all lawmakers.
Should that threshold be met, the proposal would be put to a public referendum.
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
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