Taiwan should create a military aviation law to give legal protection to its air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in counteracting Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) drones, National Defense University associate professor of law and military officer Lee Yen-chang (李彥璋) said on Saturday.
The PLA has increased its efforts to compress Taiwan’s defensive area by crossing into the latter’s ADIZ with ships and aircraft including uncrewed aerial vehicles, major Yen wrote in an article published in this month’s issue of Air Force Bimonthly.
The Chicago Convention on International Civilian Aviation, which governs transnational civilian flights, neither allows nor forbids governments from staking out its ADIZs, he said.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of National Defense
This means ADIZs have an unclear legal status in international law, and the right to self-defense inside an ADIZ is conditional, he said.
The legitimate exercise of the right to self-defense by a nation state must be an appropriate, necessary, incremental and proportional response to actions causing actual harm, instead of merely posing a military threat, Yen said.
The bounds of the nation’s ADIZ were unilaterally established by the Civil Aviation Administration and far exceed the military’s requirement for a reasonably delineated defensive zone, he said.
The military and civilian administration of the zone should have been kept separate due to differences in their purpose, even if the designated air space were identical, Yen said.
The nation did not create clear legal guidelines for the armed forces dealing with foreign aircraft to counter Beijng’s challenges to its authority, he said.
Legislating a military aviation law would address these issues and form the basis of a common standard to govern ADIZ claims in the region, Yen said.
International law is indifferent to ADIZs which are created unilaterally by national governments, Institute for National Defense and Security Research research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said.
The proposed promulgation of a military aviation law would provide Taiwanese air and air defense units with rules for handling unidentified aircraft outside the nation’s sovereign airspace, he said.
Most countries use their civil aviation laws to govern ADIZs enforcement, but Taiwanese civil aviation authorities are not sufficiently familiar with military requirements to propose legislation on the matter, he added.
Institute associate research fellow Shu Hsiao-huang (舒孝煌) said that Taiwan has to rethink the bounds of its ADIZ, which extends into the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi.
These ADIZ claims might be valid in domestic law but are meaningless because they include airspace that the nation’s military aircraft cannot go into, he added.
The inspection equipment and data transmission system for new robotic dogs that Taipei is planning to use for sidewalk patrols were developed by a Taiwanese company, the city’s New Construction Office said today, dismissing concerns that the China-made robots could pose a security risk. The city is bringing in smart robotic dogs to help with sidewalk inspections, Taipei Deputy Mayor Lee Ssu-chuan (李四川) said on Facebook. Equipped with a panoramic surveillance system, the robots would be able to automatically flag problems and easily navigate narrow sidewalks, making inspections faster and more accurate, Lee said. By collecting more accurate data, they would help Taipei
STATS: Taiwan’s average life expectancy of 80.77 years was lower than that of Japan, Singapore and South Korea, but higher than in China, Malaysia and Indonesia Taiwan’s average life expectancy last year increased to 80.77 years, but was still not back to its pre-COVID-19 pandemic peak of 81.32 years in 2020, the Ministry of the Interior said yesterday. The average life expectancy last year increased the 0.54 years from 2023, the ministry said in a statement. For men and women, the average life expectancy last year was 77.42 years and 84.30 years respectively, up 0.48 years and 0.56 years from the previous year. Taiwan’s average life expectancy peaked at 81.32 years in 2020, as the nation was relatively unaffected by the pandemic that year. The metric
TAKING STOCK: The USMC is rebuilding a once-abandoned airfield in Palau to support large-scale ground operations as China’s missile range grows, Naval News reported The US Marine Corps (USMC) is considering new sites for stockpiling equipment in the West Pacific to harden military supply chains and enhance mobility across the Indo-Pacific region, US-based Naval News reported on Saturday. The proposed sites in Palau — one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — and Australia would enable a “rapid standup of stored equipment within a year” of the program’s approval, the report said, citing documents published by the USMC last month. In Palau, the service is rebuilding a formerly abandoned World War II-era airfield and establishing ancillary structures to support large-scale ground operations “as China’s missile range and magazine
A 72-year-old man in Kaohsiung was sentenced to 40 days in jail after he was found having sex with a 67-year-old woman under a slide in a public park on Sunday afternoon. At 3pm on Sunday, a mother surnamed Liang (梁) was with her child at a neighborhood park when they found the man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and woman, surnamed Huang (黃), underneath the slide. Liang took her child away from the scene, took photographs of the two and called the police, who arrived and arrested the couple. During questioning, Tsai told police that he had met Huang that day and offered to
RSS