Lawyers, student leaders and a legislator yesterday accused law-enforcement agencies, including prosecutors and the police, of abusing their powers and intimidation for summoning and questioning hundreds of Sunflower movement participants since the movement’s protests ended on April 10.
More than 400 people have been questioned or investigated by the prosecutors and the police, who obtained the protesters’ personal and medical information — sometimes illegally — since the three-week-long occupation of the Legislative Yuan’s main chamber, they said.
“There are people who were simply sitting outside the Executive Yuan [during the storming] being investigated, and some students have been summoned for questioning just because they left their contact numbers when accompanying their friends to a hospital,” Democratic Front Against Cross-strait Trade in Services Agreement convener Lai Chung-chiang (賴中強) told a press conference at the Legislative Yuan.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Lee Chun-ta (李俊達), a representative from the student group Democracy Tautin, and Black Island Nation Youth Front spokesperson Huang Yu-Fen (黃郁芬) criticized Taipei hospitals for providing visit records to authorities. They accused the hospitals of flouting medical ethics and said that the hospitals had become the authorities’ stooges.
“Hospitals are supposed to be a place where lives are saved and injuries attended to, but now they have become the abettor of the authorities’ persecution as people are being hunted down by the state power for visiting a medical facility,” Huang said.
However, Lee Wui-chiang (李偉強), head of the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Department of Medical Affairs, denied that hospitals had turned over personal information about patients to the police, adding that the ministry had confirmed and reconfirmed with hospital officials that such details had not been given out.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女) said she wanted to know why, “if the police could identify participants involved in the movement so easily, without help from the hospitals, those police officers who wielded batons against protesters have been so difficult to find?”
A National Fire Agency official said the Taipei City Fire Department did hand over information on 36 people, out of the 42 requests that it received from the Taipei City Police Department.
“They were all processed as confidential documents,” he said.
Attorney Liu Chi-wei (劉繼蔚) said the Emergency Medical Services Act (緊急救護法) prohibits the disclosure, without permission, of “information, known or held from performing … duties.”
“Officials have not been held politically accountable for the state violence committed, while people are now intimidated by the state power… The laws are simply tools and toys for the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] government to play with,” said Dennis Wei (魏揚), a key figure in the Sunflower movement.
Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆), another student leader, said prosecutors are going beyond the call of duty as part of the government’s intimidation measures against those who “dare to express their dissent against the establishment.”
Student leader Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷) questioned the need to interrogate hundreds of people when the main actors of the movement have already, on their own initiative, offered to help prosecutors and police clarify what occurred during the protests.
“President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said on June 4, commemorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre, that he hopes ‘democracy and rule of law could one day become the common language of the two sides of the [Taiwan] Strait.’ Ma is truly working toward that goal, since now we are getting closer to China’s standard [of repression],” Chen said.
As eight basketball-playing international students appealed to the Taiwanese basketball industry after they were excluded from the draft of an upcoming new league merging the P.League+ and the T1 League, the new league’s preparatory committee spokesperson Chang Shu-jen (張樹人) yesterday said the committee would tomorrow discuss the supplementary measures and whether the international students can join the draft. The students on Tuesday called for support on their right to play in the upcoming new league, after a merger involving the two leagues impacted their eligibility for the draft. The international players from the University Basketball Association (UBA), led by first pick prospect
WARNING: China has stepped up harassment of foreign vessels after its new regulation took effect last month, an official said, citing an incident in the Diaoyutai Islands The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) yesterday linked China’s seizure of a Taiwanese fishing vessel illegally operating in its territorial waters to Beijing’s new regulation authorizing the China Coast Guard to seize boats in waters it claims. Chinese officials boarded and then seized a Taiwanese fishing vessel operating near China’s coast close to Kinmen County late on Tuesday and took it to a Chinese port, the CGA said. The Penghu-registered squid fishing vessel Da Jin Man No. 88 (大進滿88) was boarded and seized by China Coast Guard east-northeast of Liaoluo Bay (料羅灣), 17.5 nautical miles (32.4km) from Taiwan’s restricted waters off Kinmen,
Some foreign companies are considering moving Taiwanese employees out of China after Beijing said it could impose the death penalty on “die-hard” Taiwanese independence advocates, four people familiar with the matter said. The new guidelines have caused some Taiwanese expatriates and foreign multinationals operating in China to scramble to assess their legal risks and exposure, said the people, who include a lawyer and two executives with direct knowledge of the discussions. “Several companies have come to us to assess the risks to their personnel,” said the lawyer, James Zimmerman, a Beijing-based partner at the Perkins Coie law firm. He declined to identify
BOLSTERING DEFENSE: The explosive is 40 percent more powerful than those in use and could be deployed for Hsiung Feng II and III missiles, a government source said The Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has developed a polycyclic nitroamine explosive, commonly known as CL-20, which is the most powerful non-nuclear explosive known, a government source said yesterday on condition of anonymity. The institute has significantly improved explosive and rocket propellant research and development in recent years, the source said. A new factory was established in June 2022 with NT$540 million (US$16.6 million) in equipment installed, the source said. A central complex that would house 50-gallon (189 liters) and 300-gallon (1,136 liters) explosive mixer machines, as well as a storage device, was constructed in the factory, the institute said. The explosive is