The Shilin District Court yesterday sentenced a Chinese man who sailed a speedboat near the mouth of the Tamsui River (淡水河) in June to eight months in prison for violating immigration law.
The man, arrested in June by the Coast Guard Administration, received the sentence for contravening the Immigration Act (入出國及移民法) after he entered Taiwan without the necessary permits, the court said in a statement.
The verdict can be appealed.
Photo courtesy of the Coast Guard Administration via CNA
Under the law, people who enter Taiwan without permission are subject to jail terms of up to five years and/or a fine of up to NT$500,000.
The suspect, identified as a 60-year-old man surnamed Ruan (阮), said he was restricted from leaving China over online speech issues.
He brought a speedboat for 36,000 yuan (US $5,036) at Sandu’ao port in Ningde in China’s Fujian Province on the morning of June 8, and then set off from the port by speedboat at about 10pm the same day, according to a statement issued by the Shilin District Prosecutors' Office on Aug. 14.
Ruan drove the boat to Taiwan and arrived at a Tamsui ferry pier in northern Taiwan at about 9am the next day.
The coast guard began monitoring the small boat after it received a report that the vessel had hit a local commercial passenger vessel while approaching Fisherman’s Wharf, the prosecutors' office said.
The man then went ashore and said he wanted to surrender.
He said: “I wanted to flee from there” and “I came from China for democracy,” but he was arrested by the coast guard, which also seized his boat and GPS receiver, the office said.
The Shilin District Court on June 17 approved a request by prosecutors to detain Ruan and hold him incommunicado.
It also ruled that he should be held in custody at a National Immigration Agency detention center.
The court yesterday ruled that the man had taken steps to surrender himself voluntarily to authorities, so deserved a more lenient sentence.
Whether or not the Chinese man will be forced to leave the country will be left to the discretion of the administrative agency, according to the district court.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS