If the current Legislative Yuan is dissolved, new legislative elections will have to be conducted under the new electoral system, the Central Election Commission said on Friday.
The commission made the announcement amid reports that the opposition was considering a recall of the president or the toppling of the Cabinet in the wake of a spate of corruption scandals implicating the close aides and family members of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).
Election commission officials said if opposition legislators initiated a motion of no-confidence and won enough support in the legislature, and the president refused to budge and instead dissolved the legislature, then they would have to conduct the new legislative election within 60 days.
The new legislative election would be carried out according to the amended Constitution, including the new electoral system of "single constituency, two votes" under a re-districting scheme and the halving of the number of legislative seats to 113, adopted last June.
According to the recently amended law governing the election and recall of public functionaries, the legislature is required to give its consent to the re-districting scheme at least 13 months before the current legislature expires.
Commission spokesman Deng Tien-you (鄧天祐) said the draft re-districting scheme, which was mapped out by the commission after a lengthy consultation period with local election commissions and the views of academics and experts, has already been sent to the legislature.
If the legislature has not yet given its consent and a new legislative election is approaching, then the new constituency would follow the re-districting scheme mapped out by the commission, because the status of the Constitution is higher than the law, he said.
The newly elected legislators would be sworn in for four-year terms instead of the current three years, according to the amended Constitution.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
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