The seventh Environmental Im-pact Assessment Committee came under fire during its very first meeting yesterday, with environmentalists accusing its members of being heavily biased toward business interests.
Green Party Taiwan Secretary-General Pan Han-shen (
disguised
Fang Chien (方儉), secretary-general of the Green Consumers' Foundation, said that the five true environmentalists on the committee had been replaced by Democratic Progressive Party "troops" disguised as academics and experts.
These people, Fang said, intended to push through a series of controversial projects.
He said the committee would offer up Taiwan's environment to Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (
Fang said the inspiration for the funeral theme had come from committee member James Lee (
Fang said that the "rubber stamp" committee shouldn't waste public funds pretending to deliberate, and instead just go ahead and give approval to the projects.
Protesters brought baskets of flowers and read obituaries at the "funeral" demonstration, saying that "environmental assessment is dead."
professional
Members of the committee, meanwhile, were adamant that they would act according to their professionalism and conscience.
EPA Minister Winston Dang (陳重信) presided over the first committee meeting, saying that in the next two years it would strive toward professionalism, efficiency and simplicity while strengthening policy communication and its legal system.
He said that the EPA was considering commissioning private consulting companies to assess certain cases before being sent back to the committee for deliberation.
The High Prosecutors’ Office yesterday withdrew an appeal against the acquittal of a former bank manager 22 years after his death, marking Taiwan’s first instance of prosecutors rendering posthumous justice to a wrongfully convicted defendant. Chu Ching-en (諸慶恩) — formerly a manager at the Taipei branch of BNP Paribas — was in 1999 accused by Weng Mao-chung (翁茂鍾), then-president of Chia Her Industrial Co, of forging a request for a fixed deposit of US$10 million by I-Hwa Industrial Co, a subsidiary of Chia Her, which was used as collateral. Chu was ruled not guilty in the first trial, but was found guilty
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A wild live dugong was found in Taiwan for the first time in 88 years, after it was accidentally caught by a fisher’s net on Tuesday in Yilan County’s Fenniaolin (粉鳥林). This is the first sighting of the species in Taiwan since 1937, having already been considered “extinct” in the country and considered as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. A fisher surnamed Chen (陳) went to Fenniaolin to collect the fish in his netting, but instead caught a 3m long, 500kg dugong. The fisher released the animal back into the wild, not realizing it was an endangered species at
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