Two Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) referendum proposals on “opposing the abolition of the death penalty” and “opposing martial law” have been placed on the agenda of the legislative plenary session scheduled for tomorrow for discussion before being put to a vote.
The agenda-setting motion was passed on Tuesday in a vote during a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Procedure Committee, in which the KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) hold a majority.
The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) lawmakers on the committee all voted against the motion.
Photo: Chen Yi-kuan, Taipei Times
The proposed referendum on “opposing martial law” comes after President William Lai (賴清德) in March proposed reinstating military trials.
Martial law was imposed from 1949 to 1987 during a period of KMT authoritarian rule prior to Taiwan’s democratization.
The opposition’s push for the two proposals came after the expiration of the one-month negotiation period required for bills involving interparty disputes before a second reading.
On March 25, the KMT and the TPP jointly moved the proposals directly to a second reading without committee review, following an unsuccessful attempt by the DPP to block their inclusion on the legislative agenda.
The DPP proposed a motion during the Procedural Committee meeting asserting that the March 25 legislative session was illegal and asking that the 62 lawmakers from the KMT, the TPP and independents be sent to the Discipline Committee for contravening statutory meeting procedures and disrupting order at the legislature.
The DPP’s proposal was voted down.
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
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