The High Court yesterday revoked guilty verdicts against seven people involved in the occupation of the Executive Yuan during the 2014 Sunflower movement, as the charges against them have been dropped.
In April last year, the High Court sentenced the defendants to prison terms ranging from two to four months for inciting the occupation.
After an appeal, the Supreme Court in January remanded the cases to the High Court, saying that the defendants were exercising their “right of resistance,” or civil disobedience, as part of their freedom of expression.
The High Court yesterday said the role of the defendants in the occupation of the Executive Yuan complex had been redefined as assisting rather than inciting protesters, adding that the Executive Yuan had dropped its charges against the defendants and the cases have been closed.
The Sunflower movement was triggered by the then-ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) moving to fast-track a bill on a cross-strait services trade agreement with China.
During the protests from March 18 to April 10, hundreds of people broke into the Legislative Yuan, while thousands demonstrated outside the complex.
One group, which included the seven defendants, attempted to occupy the nearby Executive Yuan on March 23, but was forcibly removed by police wielding batons and firing water cannons during the early hours of March 24.
The defendants accused of inciting the Executive Yuan occupation were first tried in 2017 in the Taipei District Court, which acquitted them. Prosecutors appealed to the High Court, which last year overturned the lower court’s verdicts and found them guilty.
The High Court’s decision yesterday cannot be appealed.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Taiwan’s population last year shrank further and births continued to decline to a yearly low, the Ministry of the Interior announced today. The ministry published the 2024 population demographics statistics, highlighting record lows in births and bringing attention to Taiwan’s aging population. The nation’s population last year stood at 23,400,220, a decrease of 20,222 individuals compared to 2023. Last year, there were 134,856 births, representing a crude birth rate of 5.76 per 1,000 people, a slight decline from 2023’s 135,571 births and 5.81 crude birth rate. This decrease of 715 births resulted in a new record low per the ministry’s data. Since 2016, which saw
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
China’s newest Type-076 amphibious assault ship has two strengths and weaknesses, wrote a Taiwanese defense expert, adding that further observations of its capabilities are warranted. Jiang Hsin-biao (江炘杓), an assistant researcher at the National Defense and Security Research, made the comments in a report recently published by the institute about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military and political development. China christened its new assault ship Sichuan in a ceremony on Dec. 27 last year at Shanghai’s Hudong Shipyard, China’s Xinhua news agency reported. “The vessel, described as the world’s largest amphibious assault ship by the [US think tank] Center for Strategic and International
RSS