The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) is pushing the legislature to pass a refugee law in the hope that asylum seekers from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Tibet will be able to stay legally in Taiwan, MAC Vice Chairman Liu Te-hsun (劉德勳) said yesterday.
If the law clears the legislative floor, it would provide a legal basis for the government to handle affairs related to refugees and give people a clear concept of refugee issues, Liu said.
Currently, most refugees seeking asylum in Taiwan are from Tibet or are descendants of the remnants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies that were stranded in northern Thailand following the defeat of the KMT in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
Two Chinese democracy activists, Cai Lujun (蔡陸軍) and Wu Yalin (吳亞林), have also sought sanctuary, Liu said.
Cai sneaked into Taiwan last year and was held for six months at the Hsinchu detention center for illegal Chinese immigrants, while Wu sought political asylum after he arrived last year as a tourist, Liu said. Both have now obtained temporary resident status, he added.
The two men came under the media spotlight last September when they scaled the wall of the American Institute in Taiwan compound in Taipei to request political asylum in the US.
As Taiwan does not have a political refugee or asylum law, the government has not been able to grant political asylum to the two Chinese political activists, but they have been allowed to remain in the country temporarily on a humanitarian basis, Liu said.
The MAC is providing a monthly stipend of between NT$10,000 and NT$20,000 to help with their living expenses because they are not allowed to work, Liu said, adding that this would continue to be a financial burden on the agency as an additional expenditure.
The MAC hopes that the law will soon be passed to allow political asylum seekers to gain resident status and allow them to seek work once they are certified as refugees, he said.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
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