Legal reform groups and a law professor yesterday condemned Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) and the Taipei police force over abuses of power and initiating litigation against protesters and three journalists in an incident on Thursday night in which activists broke into the Ministry of Education building to protest over proposed adjustments to curriculum guidelines for high-school textbooks.
Wu said that 33 individuals, including the three journalists, were to be charged.
Human-rights lawyer Chan Shun-kuei (詹順貴) said the police had clearly overstepped their bounds and had not only infringed upon freedom of the press, but some police officers might have violated the law in confining the freedom of movement of members of the public.
“The intent of the law is to punish people who intrude into properties without good reason or cause. However, the journalists were doing their job, gathering news; they had legitimate reasons to be there,” Chan said.
“The police forcibly confiscated mobile phones, cameras and other tools used by the journalists to gather news. The journalists were then prevented from contacting anybody. These are violations of confining the movement of citizens. I strongly recommend the three journalists take up litigation against the police,” Chan added.
National Taiwan University law professor Chen Chih-lung (陳志龍) also criticized the questionable application of judicial power.
“The journalists were doing media work, for the benefit of thepublic’s right to know. That was why they entered the education ministry to take photographs and make video recordings,” he said.
Although their actions could be construed as intrusion of property, the law does grant journalists the right to gather news, and the police officers’ actions in obstructing their work could be construed as unlawful, Chen said.
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
Taiwan’s passport ranked 34th in the world, with access to 141 visa-free destinations, according to the latest update to the Henley Passport Index released today. The index put together by Henley & Partners ranks 199 passports globally based on the number of destinations holders can access without a visa out of 227, and is updated monthly. The 141 visa-free destinations for Taiwanese passport holders are a slight decrease from last year, when holders had access to 145 destinations. Botswana and Columbia are among the countries that have recently ended visa-free status for Taiwanese after “bowing to pressure from the Chinese government,” the Ministry
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