New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Chiu Hsien-chih (邱顯智) yesterday called for an independent investigation into allegations that police used excessive force during a protest in Taipei on Friday.
The Railway Bureau on Tuesday last week began tearing down the three remaining homes that stood in the way of a planned railway relocation project.
Having been unsuccessful in their protests in Tainan, a group of students on Friday traveled to Taipei to protest in front of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
Photo: Cheng Wei-chi, Taipei Times
However, after the protest turned violent, police began restraining people, including a journalist from an online media company, Chiu said, adding that there were allegations that police used excessive force as they held people down on the ground while restraining them.
During a meeting of the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee yesterday, at which Control Yuan Secretary-General Chu Fu-mei (朱富美) was invited to speak, Chiu and NPP Legislator Chen Jiau-hua (陳椒華) brought up the allegations and called for an independent investigation by the Control Yuan’s National Human Rights Committee.
In the second national report on investigations regarding the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, there were eight issues related to forced evictions and relocation, housing justice and land expropriation, Chiu said.
The National Human Rights Committee had on Aug. 1 discussed whether to investigate the railway relocation project, Chiu added.
Chu said that following an investigation in 2013, the committee asked the Tainan City Government to improve communication with residents and report on its progress every six months.
However, the investigation was never concluded, she said.
Chiu asked Chu whether she agreed with the argument by the Taipei Police Department’s Zhongzheng First Precinct that officers were empowered to use force to restrain protesters in accordance with Article 19 of the Police Power Exercise Act (警察職權行使法).
The article stipulates: “The police may bring a person under control if he/she ... [is] being insane or drunk to the degree that makes restraint necessary in order to avert a situation that may endanger his/her life or prevent danger to the life or health of another person.”
Chu said there was “room for discussion on the issue” and that she would bring up the issue with the committee.
Chen said there were also concerns that during the protest, after a scuffle broke out between police and protesters, two male officers allegedly forced a female student to the ground.
“Is that not a clear violation of human rights and the principle of proportionality?” she asked.
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
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
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