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Give Us a Parade and Assembly Law in Accordance with the Development ofDemocracy

Give Us a Parade and Assembly Law in Accordance with the Development of Democracy

Alliance for the Amendment of the Parade and Assembly Law
Press Release

After the negotiation breakdown of the draft law in March, as it moves on to the decision by vote in the Legislative Yuan, the Alliance for the Amendment of the Parade and Assembly Law has started a series of campaigns to stop the bad version of amendment. During the past two moths, different parties, including NGO workers, scholars, experts from the human rights advisory council, and the newspaper editors have issued severe criticism. The civil society firstly blocked the bad version, lobbying and now trying to lead the amendment to a passing one.

The Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) came up with a new version on June 3rd. That indicated the civil society’s pressure and active engagement could guide the authority concerned into communication in making important national policies. The reason why the civil society could not accept and decided to keep resisting the version was because the version is far from a passing one. We’d like to remind the authority concerned and the legislators the important historical meaning of the fist time attempt to amend the law in twenty years. The new version would reflect the development of democracy now in Taiwan. It will also testify whether we are still shadowed by the martial law ideology or we have stride forward to the next stage of democratization.

The Alliance for the Amendment of the Parade and Assembly Law and the Civil Society thus appeal to the ruling party that:

1. The new amendment should base on the presupposition to give up mandatory registration and the police’s power to order dissolution. It should also specify rules on the police coercive power and the use of riot control tools according to the proportional principle and the protection in the Constitution. Based on the presupposition, we’d like to negotiation further on the specific articles.

2. Lin Yi-shih. KMT Policy Committee Director mentioned that KMT has never said they would force a decision by vote on the amendment of the Parade and Assembly Law. We ask the ruling party to keep their promise and continue to communicate with the civil society and the opposition party to reach a consensus.

The civil society’s expectation toward a parade and assembly protection law is not high at all. The amendment means much for the reason of the shadowed martial law period and the recent incident of the Chinese envoy’s visit. In early June, Lin Jia Fan, the president of Taiwan Association for Human Rights and Lee Min Tsung, the assistant professor of the Sociology Department of National Taiwan University, were indicted for the violation of the Parade and Assembly when advocating of the amendment of it. The Parade and Assembly Law we have now is a mistake in the history, but the government now is going to take the responsibilities of the new amendment. If by any chance the bad law is passed, the civil society would not hesitate and test the law ourselves to examine the promise of the ruling party to give the streets back to people.