Lawyers and civil groups today petitioned for a constitutional review of the Taoyuan Aerotropolis zone expropriation, the largest such project in Taiwan’s history.
The Taoyuan Aerotropolis project, the first phase of which covered more than 2,500 hectares, has been mired in controversy since the planning stage.
Under Article 4 of the Land Expropriation Act (土地徵收條例), there are vague grounds for “zone expropriation,” allowing the government to expropriate thousands of hectares, Aerotropolis litigation team lawyer Lin Hsu-feng (林旭峰) told a news conference outside the Judicial Yuan in Taipei.
Photo: Chiu Yi-tung, Taipei Times
The scope can also exceed the actual needs of public infrastructure, Lin added.
Some expropriated land is not used directly for public purposes, but is later developed and sold, allowing private parties to profit while lowering government construction costs, Lin said.
Original landowners receive much smaller plots under the land-for-compensation system, effectively bearing the cost of public construction themselves, he said.
The system strays from the Constitution’s requirement of serving public interest and may contravene proportionality, fair burden-sharing and property rights, he said, adding that that the Constitutional Court should clarify the government’s expropriation limits.
The advance zone expropriation system under Article 4, Paragraph 2 of the Land Expropriation Act goes against the Urban Planning Act’s (都市計畫法) principle that planning should guide development, turning urban planning into a tool to justify land expropriation, lawyer Hsiung Yi-ling (熊依翎) said.
The advance zone expropriation system was designed in part to reduce public resistance and speed up expropriation, but in practice has expanded the scope of expropriation and may allow the state to intervene in land development for financial gain, Hsiung said.
This undermines the requirement that expropriation serve a clear public interest, contravenes due process and infringes on property rights, she said.
The current system effectively replaces legal procedures set out in the Land Expropriation Act with administrative regulations that end up overriding the law, raising serious constitutional concerns, National Chengchi University land economics professor Hsu Shih-jung (徐世榮) said.
Shezidao Self-help Association spokesperson Li Hua-ping (李華萍) urged the Constitutional Court to address the system’s infringement on people’s fundamental rights.
People are entitled to basic protections such as property rights and the right to housing, but they lose control over their property and livelihood under the zone expropriation system, Li said.
Zone expropriation is unjust and should not be used as a pretext for forced evictions, she said.
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