A resident whose property is subject to expropriation under the Taoyuan Aerotropolis development project yesterday along with civic groups filed a petition for constitutional review of relevant regulations.
The project is an urban development project initiated by the central government more than a decade ago to facilitate industrial and economic development around Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.
The first phase of the zone expropriation plan was approved by the Ministry of the Interior in 2020, with the Civil Aviation Administration and the Taoyuan City Government being the land acquisition agencies.
Photo: Yang Hisn-hui, Taipei Times
Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident who acts as the petitioner for the constitutional review, said much of the farmland around where he lives has been expropriated.
His property in the city’s Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) falls within the project’s designated area for use by the airport.
The borough was excluded from the zone appropriation in the ministry’s Urban Planning Commission No. 818 meeting in 2013.
However, it was included around the beginning of 2021 as a priority relocation area due to the construction of the airport’s third runway.
Chen said more than 4,000 hectares of land is being expropriated while only about 700 hectares are designated as aviation land.
Many residents like Chen were forced into a difficult situation as the government failed to fulfil its pledge to build relocation housing before demolishing their present residences, he said.
Chen is seeking constitutional review of relevant regulations as his case was dismissed by the Supreme Administrative Court in its final and binding judgement.
Civic groups said such zone expropriation might be unconstitutional as part of the expropriated land is not used specifically for public infrastructure construction and would be sold to private businesses via tender calls.
Litigation team attorney Lin Hsu-feng (林旭峰) said Paragraph 1, Article 4 of the Land Expropriation Act (土地徵收條例) might be unconstitutional as it allows zone expropriation that benefits private businesses without specifying reasons.
Such a mechanism does not align with the Constitution’s requirement that land expropriation should serve a significant public interest, he said.
Litigation team attorney Hsiung Yi-ling (熊依翎) said the act’s Paragraph 2, Article 4 might also be unconstitutional, as it allows zone expropriation before announcing its urban planning project.
Regulations governing the implementation of zone expropriation also include provisions that might be unconstitutional for similar reasons, she said.
National Chengchi University land economics professor Hsu Shih-jung (徐世榮) said Taiwan’s zone expropriation mechanism can be traced back to the excess condemnation approach adopted by some European countries in the 19th century.
The approach would excessively expropriate land around a project site and then sell the land at rising prices to compensate for costs of public infrastructure construction, he said.
Such approaches were already rejected by many US state supreme courts and abandoned by European countries, he added.
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