Former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) mother made a plea for her son’s release yesterday, one day before the Taiwan High Court is expected to decide whether to continue his detention.
Attending a funeral for the former president’s uncle in Tainan, Chen Lee Shen (陳李慎) said: “My son did nothing wrong. Why has he been detained so long?”
“As a mother, I feel deeply sad. I cannot eat during the day and cannot sleep at night,” she said.
PHOTO: CNA
Chen Shui-bian has been detained for more than 500 days and his current term of detention is scheduled to end on April 23.
Teng Chen-chiu (鄧振球), the presiding judge in the case, said during Friday’s hearing that the court intended to make a decision today.
Teng had said the Chen family would have to remit NT$700 million (US$21 million) to a designated account if the former president were to have any chance of being released on bail.
Chen’s son, Chen Chih-chung (陳致中), said of the judge’s remark that he and his family had done everything they could to have the money from his family’s Swiss bank accounts remitted to Taiwan and that it was up to the Special Investigation Panel (SIP) to decide when the transfer would take place.
The Taiwan High Court has announced it will deliver a verdict for the second trial on June 11.
The Taipei District Court sentenced Chen Shui-bian and his wife Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) to life in prison in September after handing down a guilty verdict in the first trial against the former first couple and 11 others.
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
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
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