More than 100,000 people came out this Friday to protest in front of the Taiwan Parliament in rejection of the scenes of chaos that have occurred in recent days in the chamber and to demand transparency in the legislative process in the territory. The protests began to gain momentum in the last three days, since last Thursday some 30,000 people protested before the assembly against the debate of several highly controversial laws among the territory’s population, such as the expansion of the chamber’s investigative powers. This Friday’s protest has focused on criticism against opposition parties, favorable to China, such as the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) or the Taiwan People’s Party, accused of violating parliamentary procedures. Specifically, protesters understand that the bills should be returned to the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee for a substantive review, while last week’s proceedings should be declared invalid, they said. The bills, they denounce, were not subject to a line-by-line review in the committee, but rather the versions proposed by opposition legislators were sent directly to the legislative plenary session, where on Friday of last week the two parties presented a series of revisions that were not available for review on the legislature’s website. Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers said the process lacked transparency, while the opposition has responded by offering hard copies of the reviews on their desks at the time of the procedure. Meanwhile, inside the conference room, deputies from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which holds the Presidency, protested and expressed their discontent with banners that read “No discussion, no democracy,” reports the ‘Taipei Times’. Opposition legislators, who form the majority in Parliament, insisted that they were promoting reforms following democratic norms during a series of debates in the chamber that have gone around the world due to numerous physical confrontations between deputies.
