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.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods