A Beijing court yesterday sentenced 29 people from Taiwan who had been deported from Spain to up to 14 years in prison for telecom fraud, part of a series of deportations decried by Taiwan as an abuse of human rights.
In recent years, hundreds of Taiwanese suspected of telecom fraud have been deported to China, sometimes forcibly, from countries including Kenya, Cambodia and Armenia, the Taiwanese government said.
China has defended the deportations, saying that they were suspected of defrauding Chinese people and so should be tried in Chinese courts.
A recent judgement by a Beijing court said that the suspects had defrauded people living in China by calling them from their base in Spain and claiming to be Chinese law enforcement officials.
VICTIMS’ LOSSES
A total of 14 victims were defrauded out of more than 6.17 million yuan (US$943,375), it said.
Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Deputy Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said that more information on the case is being sought, and urged China to cooperate in fighting crime.
The deportations have arisen from the “one China” policy of most countries, under which they maintain formal relations only with the People’s Republic of China rather than Taiwan, with governments deciding to send them to China for trial.
COMPLAINTS
Taiwan has complained about a lack of due process and expressed concern about mistreatment of its people in Chinese jails.
Chinese authorities have sought to contain an explosion of telecom crime that Beijing says has led to huge financial losses, with callers often impersonating officials or authority figures, and preying on older people, students or the unemployed.
The fraud has spread overseas, with Chinese speakers recruited in Taiwan setting up operations in East Africa or Southeast Asia.
TENSE SITUATION: If the storm does not bring rain, Taiwan might have to wait until next month amid water scarcity in the center and south, an expert said Typhoon Surigae is to bring rain to the nation’s east coast and mountainous areas in central and southern Taiwan from Wednesday to Friday, the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) said yesterday. As of 2pm yesterday, the typhoon’s center was 1,170km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost tip. The radius of the storm was 280km, and it was moving northwest at 9kph, with a maximum wind speed of 198kph. The bureau forecasts that the storm would switch to a northerly direction when approaching the east coast of Luzon Island in the Philippines on Wednesday, CWB forecaster Lin Ding-yi (林定宜) said, adding that Surigae would
SEEKING CLARITY: Some members of the US delegation asked KMT legislators in a meeting to address their party’s position on the so-called ‘1992 consensus,’ sources said A US delegation tasked by US President Joe Biden to reaffirm the country’s commitment to its partnership with Taiwan yesterday wrapped up a three-day visit to Taipei. Former US senator Chris Dodd, former US deputy secretaries of state Richard Armitage and James Steinberg, and US Department of State Office of Taiwan Coordination Director Dan Biers departed at 11:20am on a private jet. The members of the delegation, all friends of Biden, arrived on Wednesday and met with President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and other government officials. During the three-day visit, the delegation also met with six members of the Legislative
Taipei’s street names should reflect a “Taiwanese spirit,” Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said in an online video released yesterday, in which he asked why many of them are named after locations in China. In a three-minute video uploaded to a Facebook page called “Taiwanese Uncle Ko Wen-je” (台灣阿北柯文哲), the mayor suggested changing the names of Taipei streets. The page’s banner was a photograph of Ko on Jade Mountain’s (玉山) main peak. The page was closed at about noon, about four hours after it was made public. Ko said that street names in the capital named “Ningxia,” “Tibet,” “Beiping” — an old name for
‘AN EXCUSE’: The intent of Beijing’s incursions was ‘intimidation and coercion,’ a senior US official said, adding that China was using the US to justify its actions Chinese carrier drills and stepped-up incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone in the past few weeks are meant to send a message to Washington to stand down and back off, security sources in Taipei said. The increased activity — which China, unusually, described as “combat drills” on Wednesday — has raised alarm in both Taipei and Washington, although security officials do not see it as a sign of an imminent attack. Rather, at least some of the exercises are practicing “access denial” maneuvers to prevent foreign forces from coming to Taipei’s defense in a war, one official familiar with Taiwan’s security
RSS