Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Aborigines protest township losses

Taipei Times

Aboriginal and human rights activists yesterday protested the abolition of Aboriginal townships in counties to be administratively upgraded to special municipalities on Saturday, urging legal revisions to allow them to maintain their autonomous status.

“This is not our first time here, we’ve been here several times, making the same demands over and over, and received promise after promise from the government,” Aboriginal Action Alliance Convener Lituan Takelutuen told a press conference held at the Legislative Yuan.

Ma’s delusions of ‘soft power’

Taipei Times Editorial

After years of assailing our ears with notions of “win-win” situations President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has now latched onto a new term that, unfortunately for us, he now seems intent on milking dry: “soft power.”

No sooner had US political scientist Joseph Nye, the person who coined the overused and oft misused term, left after a quick visit earlier this month than Ma was borrowing it to describe his policies over the past two-and-a-half years. All of a sudden, Ma’s body of work appeared to blossom into a monument to so-called soft power, which, if we looked closely enough, was a euphemism for everything the administration of his predecessor, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), supposedly was not.

No place for politicking on human rights issues

Cho Chun-ying 卓春英

On Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) announced the establishment of the Presidential Office Human Rights Consultative Committee and said that according to two UN covenants signed last year — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — all signatory nations are required to establish a human rights commission.

He also said that to ensure the two covenants were smoothly implemented, the government would set up the human rights consultative committee in the Presidential Office, instead of attaching it to the Cabinet, the Judicial Yuan or the Control Yuan.

A challenging year for human rights

Yang Tsung-li 楊宗澧

Last year, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) signed into law two key international human rights conventions — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — after they were ratified by the legislature. This was something civic groups in Taiwan had been urging the government to do for many years. The laws went into effect on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day, last year, after an unusually short preparatory period of just eight months. This year’s Human Rights Day marked one year since the two conventions came into force in Taiwan. As part of Taiwan’s domestic law, the two conventions have considerable bearing on structural issues thrown up by the great shifts in politics, economics, culture and environmental concerns that the world had undergone.

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