Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Taiwanese and Tibetan activists are urging Taiwan’s government to show greater concern over poor human rights conditions in China, and especially Tibet, that have led Tibetans to set themselves on fire in protest.

Chow Mei-li (周美里), chairwoman of the Taiwan Friends of Tibet, said she believes Taiwan’s government has the ability and is obliged to influence China on the issue as the two sides “have many channels of communication open.” With leaders in Taiwan and China able to communicate frequently, it is Taiwan’s responsibility to urge Beijing to respect the human rights and religious freedoms of Tibetans, she said.

Tokyo-based Taiwanese writer Liu Li-erh (劉黎兒) yesterday in Taipei shared her latest fact-finding from Japan to say that now is the best time to put a halt to nuclear power in Taiwan.

Having lived in Tokyo for 30 years and experienced the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11 last year and led to the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, Liu said that more than 1 million Japanese continue to live in areas with high daily radiation exposure and the total cost of damage from the nuclear disaster is still too high to estimate.