Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Brian Hioe
DEMONSTRATORS GATHERED ON Jinan Road, in front of the Legislative Yuan, to demonstrate the KMT and TPP’s efforts to freeze the Constitutional Court today. The rally started at 6:30 PM.
This follows up on two other demonstrations that took place this month. The first took place on Saturday, August 16th, drawing 2,000 participants including several hundred lawyers. The second took place last Friday, November 22nd, and drew over 1,000.
Economic Democracy Union–the main organizer of the Bluebird Movement demonstrations six months ago–convenor Lai Chung-chiang framed today’s demonstration as the first autumn demonstration of the Bluebird Movement. Though today’s demonstration took place on a weekday, by 6:40 PM, ten minutes after the start of the protest, there were already comparable numbers to last Friday’s rally. By 8 PM, according to organizers, there were 2,000 participants.
Photo credit: Brian Hioe
The speakers for the rally drew from the usual stalwarts of civil society, including the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, Citizens of the Earth Taiwan, Taiwan Citizens’ Front, and Indigenous Youth Front. A number of academics and scholars also spoke, as did UMC founder Robert Tsao, an outspoken critic of the KMT.
Some during the rally sought to collect signatures for recall campaigns against KMT and TPP legislators, walking through the rally with placards displaying QR codes for ongoing recall campaigns. At one point in the rally, the speakers listed the key KMT and TPP legislators who have pushed for legislation aimed at freezing the Constitutional Court.
Speakers criticized the KMT for efforts to change the constitution and fundamentally alter the checks and balances of Taiwan’s government system, through legislation aimed at freezing the Constitutional Court.
The legislation would require that the Constitutional Court has a minimum of ten justices to make rulings and that 2/3rd of the full slate of justices support a ruling for it to pass. As seven justices retired in October when their terms ended, there are only eight justices on the Constitutional Court at present. The KMT and TPP aim to block any further justices from being appointed by the Lai administration in order that the Constitutional Court is not able to make rulings.
In this sense, the KMT’s actions are an attempt to freeze the Constitutional Court entirely. The Constitutional Court has proved an obstacle to efforts by the KMT to expand powers through its current slim majority in the legislature, as observed in how the Constitutional Court struck down new legislative powers sought by the KMT earlier this year, which would have stripped powers normally belonging to the executive and judicial branches of government and shifted them to the legislature. This is why the KMT aims to prevent the Constitutional Court from making rulings.
Photo credit: Brian Hioe
Speakers, then, criticized the KMT from a number of perspectives. The KMT was criticized as seeking to strip rights from the people, as well as actions generally understood as acting as China’s proxy in Taiwan. This can be observed in efforts by the KMT to freeze Taiwan’s budget, inclusive of the defense budget, as well as hollowing out civil defense legislation. The KMT was criticized from the standpoint of environmental and land rights over legislation over redrawing up land in a manner without making distinctions between private and public legislation. Likewise, the KMT was criticized for taking hostage and seeking to reduce funding that would otherwise go to mental health services.
Recent events in Hong Kong were brought up as showing the dangers for Taiwan of getting too close to China. Taiwan’s recent baseball victory was also cited as highlighting Taiwan’s international marginalization, something that the KMT’s actions have willfully contributed to. One protest chant used during the rally was drawn from baseball chants. Yang Shuang-zi and Lin King’s US National Book Award win for Translated Literature was also cited as an instance of national pride, particularly because Yang’s speech after the win brought up Taiwanese self-determination. Savungaz Valincinan of the Indigenous Youth Front criticized the current system in which Indigenous are not allowed to vote for local legislators, but only nationwide Indigenous representatives, also criticizing pan-Blue Indigenous legislators for not acting in the interests of Indigenous rights and self-determination but for the benefit of the KMT.
The TPP and KMT were further criticized over efforts to institute ID checks for signature collection during recall petitions, as well as to raise the benchmarks to hold recalls. Such actions were framed as another attempt to deprive the people of the right to recall elected politicians. ID checks for recall petitions were criticized on grounds of privacy rights–seeing as there have been many cases of groups implicated in fraud and vote buying found to participate in pan-Blue petition gathering, as in the case of Terry Gou’s independent bid for president, this raises the possibility of personal data on IDs including not only one’s national ID, but also address and the names of one’s family members, being collected and used for fraud. That national IDs presently list a great deal of sensitive personal information was criticized, as well, in line with calls by civil society to change the current national ID format.
Photo credit: Brian Hioe
To criticize the KMT and TPP’s attempts to freeze a branch of government not under their control, participants were called on to sign postcards to KMT and TPP legislators to institute the same requirements for the legislature–that 2/3rd of legislators need to be present for meetings to be held and that 2/3rd of all legislators would have to agree for laws to be passed. As this would effectively freeze the legislature, this move was to mock the KMT and TPP’s actions and highlight how their aims are not any form of “reform,” but aim to freeze the Constitutional Court altogether.
It is to be expected that further protests will take place against the KMT and TPP’s actions, then. It is to be seen if rallies grow to the size of the Bluebird Movement earlier this year, however.
The rally closed on a note of hope in comments from Lai Chung-chiang, with Lai noting that the KMT had dropped plans to discuss raising the barriers for recalls, probably in response to the protest and suggesting that the KMT was, in fact, afraid of the protests. Lai stated that there was the danger of the KMT consistently trying to change the agenda for the current legislative session to avoid protest, but that there were eleven week lefts in which protests would have to be maintained until the end of the session. Lai indicated that going forward, the movement would focus on targeting individual KMT and TPP politicians to impact the 2026 elections, with many key advocates of the attempt to freeze the Constitutional Court likely to run for mayoral positions.
Consequently, protests are planned weekly for the remainder of the legislative session. The Economic Democracy Union states that it will announce the schedule for the protests each week.