Taiwan should create a military aviation law to give legal protection to its air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in counteracting Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) drones, National Defense University associate professor of law and military officer Lee Yen-chang (李彥璋) said on Saturday.
The PLA has increased its efforts to compress Taiwan’s defensive area by crossing into the latter’s ADIZ with ships and aircraft including uncrewed aerial vehicles, major Yen wrote in an article published in this month’s issue of Air Force Bimonthly.
The Chicago Convention on International Civilian Aviation, which governs transnational civilian flights, neither allows nor forbids governments from staking out its ADIZs, he said.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of National Defense
This means ADIZs have an unclear legal status in international law, and the right to self-defense inside an ADIZ is conditional, he said.
The legitimate exercise of the right to self-defense by a nation state must be an appropriate, necessary, incremental and proportional response to actions causing actual harm, instead of merely posing a military threat, Yen said.
The bounds of the nation’s ADIZ were unilaterally established by the Civil Aviation Administration and far exceed the military’s requirement for a reasonably delineated defensive zone, he said.
The military and civilian administration of the zone should have been kept separate due to differences in their purpose, even if the designated air space were identical, Yen said.
The nation did not create clear legal guidelines for the armed forces dealing with foreign aircraft to counter Beijng’s challenges to its authority, he said.
Legislating a military aviation law would address these issues and form the basis of a common standard to govern ADIZ claims in the region, Yen said.
International law is indifferent to ADIZs which are created unilaterally by national governments, Institute for National Defense and Security Research research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said.
The proposed promulgation of a military aviation law would provide Taiwanese air and air defense units with rules for handling unidentified aircraft outside the nation’s sovereign airspace, he said.
Most countries use their civil aviation laws to govern ADIZs enforcement, but Taiwanese civil aviation authorities are not sufficiently familiar with military requirements to propose legislation on the matter, he added.
Institute associate research fellow Shu Hsiao-huang (舒孝煌) said that Taiwan has to rethink the bounds of its ADIZ, which extends into the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi.
These ADIZ claims might be valid in domestic law but are meaningless because they include airspace that the nation’s military aircraft cannot go into, he added.
A Vietnamese migrant worker on Thursday won the NT$12 million (US$383,590) jackpot on a scratch-off lottery ticket she bought from a lottery shop in Changhua County’s Puyan Township (埔鹽), Taiwan Lottery Co said yesterday. The lottery winner, who is in her 30s and married, said she would continue to work in Taiwan and send her winnings to her family in Vietnam to improve their life. More Taiwanese and migrant workers have flocked to the lottery shop on Sec 2 of Jhangshuei Road (彰水路) to share in the luck. The shop owner, surnamed Chen (陳), said that his shop has been open for just
Global bodies should stop excluding Taiwan for political reasons, President William Lai (賴清德) told Pope Francis in a letter, adding that he agrees war has no winners. The Vatican is one of only 12 countries to retain formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan, and Taipei has watched with concern efforts by Beijing and the Holy See to improve ties. In October, the Vatican and China extended an accord on the appointment of Catholic bishops in China for four years, pointing to a new level of trust between the two parties. Lai, writing to the pope in response to the pontiff’s message on Jan. 1’s
TAKE BREAKS: A woman developed cystitis by refusing to get up to use the bathroom while playing mahjong for fear of disturbing her winning streak, a doctor said People should stand up and move around often while traveling or playing mahjong during the Lunar New Year holiday, as prolonged sitting can lead to cystitis or hemorrhoids, doctors said. Yuan’s General Hospital urologist Lee Tsung-hsi (李宗熹) said that he treated a 63-year-old woman surnamed Chao (趙) who had been sitting motionless and holding off going to the bathroom, increasing her risk of bladder infection. Chao would drink beverages and not urinate for several hours while playing mahjong with friends and family, especially when she was on a winning streak, afraid that using the bathroom would ruin her luck, he said. She had
MUST REMAIN FREE: A Chinese takeover of Taiwan would lead to a global conflict, and if the nation blows up, the world’s factories would fall in a week, a minister said Taiwan is like Prague in 1938 facing Adolf Hitler; only if Taiwan remains free and democratic would the world be safe, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) said in an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The ministry on Saturday said Corriere della Sera is one of Italy’s oldest and most read newspapers, frequently covers European economic and political issues, and that Wu agreed to an interview with the paper’s senior political analyst Massimo Franco in Taipei on Jan. 3. The interview was published on Jan. 26 with the title “Taiwan like Prague in 1938 with Hitler,” the ministry
RSS