Seems like they want to take out all the fun out of politics.
The funniest bit for me was:
However, the changes were opposed by opposition parties, which said they infringe on the right to participate in politics.
One thing’s for sure: this makes get-out-of-jail cards more pricey and difficult to get.
The Legislature has passed amendments to Taiwan’s election law that will bar people convicted of certain crimes from running for public office. These include money laundering, fraud and national security offenses.
What struck me as weird is the categorisation of crimes by sentence duration, rather than classifying crimes into those that subvert safety and democracy, and those that do not. Some objectors pointed this out.
Laws get politicised and weaponised sooner or later.
it makes some sense, longer prison sentences are usually correlated with severity of the crime.
otherwise it will be difficult to define which crimes subvert safety and democracy, for examaple, is tax evasion subverting democracy ? building an illegal rooftop?
At face value it makes sense, but in reality there is no reason for this to hold in practice. Disparities in judicial systems exist, be it along socio-economic lines, ethnicity, region etc. It should be possible to find instances where a person was handed a long imprisonment for drug offenses (use), while a politician got a slap on the wrist for illegal human rights violations.