Draft conclusions of the National Congress on Judicial Reform ignore urgent gender equality and children’s rights resolutions, several members of one of the body’s subcommittees said yesterday, promising to boycott a final meeting today over the dropping of their policy recommendations.
The congress, which the Presidential Office tasked with drafting an agenda for comprehensive judicial reform, is drawing to a close after more than six months of meetings and is scheduled to present its conclusions today.
Four members of a subcommittee on “maintaining societal safety” denounced government officials, saying they pushed preset policy proposals when drafting the final agenda for today’s meeting, ignoring the group’s resolutions.
“Simply put, the government feels the congress does not have much valuable advice to offer, so officials decided to just push forward with their original agenda,” said subcommittee member Lai Fang-yu (賴芳玉), a women’s rights advocate and lawyer, adding that she felt “let down” and “ignored” by only a brief mention of “gender-friendly laws” in the final agenda.
Lai said she wrote a more than 30,000-character report detailing possible resolutions, of which the subcommittee passed several.
“I really do not understand how the meeting agenda was drafted. Was it not supposed to respect recommendations by subcommittees?” Lai said, ruling out participating in today’s meeting.
“We spent three months trying to make them listen, what difference will three minutes speaking to the president make?” she added.
“If you only want to reform judicial officials, you should call a national conference on judicial official reform,” National Chiao Tung University law professor Lin Chih-chieh (林志潔) said.
Lin criticized the meeting agenda, saying it failed to address proposals such as the passage of a “rape shield” law and decriminalizing adultery and sexual relations between consenting minors.
“We care about these issues because in our line of work we have found that the criminal justice system lacks perspective when dealing with children and different genders,” Taiwan Healthcare Reform Foundation chief executive Joanne Liu (劉淑瓊) said. “This agenda just confirms that government officials do not have any concept of the importance of these issues.”
The agenda of the original policy conference did not include gender issues, with discussion occurring only after protests, Garden of Hope Foundation chief executive Chi Hui-jung (紀惠容) said.
“Unless the Ministry of Justice says that it will address the gender equality laws we have suggested, what is the point of participating — they have already set the agenda,” Chi said. “Participating would just be a waste of time.”
Taiwan yesterday condemned the recent increase in Chinese coast guard-escorted fishing vessels operating illegally in waters around the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. Unusually large groupings of Chinese fishing vessels began to appear around the islands on Feb. 15, when at least six motherships and 29 smaller boats were sighted, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said in a news release. While CGA vessels were dispatched to expel the Chinese boats, Chinese coast guard ships trespassed into Taiwan’s restricted waters and unsuccessfully attempted to interfere, the CGA said. Due to the provocation, the CGA initiated an operation to increase
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
The Chinese military has boosted its capability to fight at a high tempo using the element of surprise and new technology, the Ministry of National Defense said in the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) published on Monday last week. The ministry highlighted Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) developments showing significant changes in Beijing’s strategy for war on Taiwan. The PLA has made significant headway in building capabilities for all-weather, multi-domain intelligence, surveillance, operational control and a joint air-sea blockade against Taiwan’s lines of communication, it said. The PLA has also improved its capabilities in direct amphibious assault operations aimed at seizing strategically important beaches,
RSS