Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators have proposed retroactive amendments to a bill on ill-gotten party assets.
The proposed amendments to the Act Governing the Handling of Ill-gotten Properties by Political Parties and Their Affiliate Organizations (政黨及其附隨組織不當取得財產處理條例) would add provisions on party-affiliated organizations.
The amendments were proposed by KMT Legislator Yu Hao (游顥) and 36 other legislators who said that administrative agencies “seriously infringed upon the rights and interests of social welfare organizations.”
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
“In addition to hindering the normal operation of these organizations, the act also damages social harmony and clearly deviates from its original legislative purpose,” the legislators said. “We’ve drafted these amendments in order to promote the healthy development of democracy and protect the public’s basic constitutional rights.”
The proposed amendments add a provision stating that “those that have been affiliated with the state are not subject to the limitations defined in the act.”
The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee in 2018 determined the China Youth Corps to be a KMT-affiliated organization, and in 2022 said 61 properties and more than NT$1.39 billion in the organization’s name were improperly acquired and should be transferred to state ownership.
China Youth Corps fought the ruling in court, and in January last year, the Supreme Administrative Court made a final ruling in the case against the organization.
Rulings like those against the China Youth Corps showed the judiciary was in agreement with the committee about the ill-gotten nature of properties owned by KMT-affiliated organizations, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus secretary-general Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) said yesterday.
“This is not just a piece of legislation, it’s a judicial process. The KMT thinks that having one more legislator seat puts it above the law, and that it can arbitrarily redact all the laws that have already been passed,” she said.
“Whether the KMT’s property is legitimate or not is unilaterally decided by the DPP,” the KMT Central Standing Committee said yesterday. “Nowhere else in the world is there a ruling party that legislates the liquidation of all properties of other political parties in the name of false transitional justice. This is a shame for Taiwan’s democracy.”
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS