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Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense is proposing a new bill to crack down on active military personnel who collude with enemies and compromise national security, Taipei Times reported.
The Ministry of National Defense said that it plans to propose a bill to punish active military personnel who pledge loyalty to an enemy and damage military interests.
The proposed amendment to the Criminal Code of the Armed Forces aims to halt the infiltration efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as per Taipei Times.
The move comes after a disturbing rise in the number of Chinese spies caught in Taiwan. According to the report released earlier this year by the National Security Bureau, the number of Chinese spies prosecuted in Taiwan rose to 64 people last year, and 28 of them were active military personnel.
Further, the ministry stated that under the proposed bill, active military personnel who pledge loyalty to an enemy — through speech, actions, words, pictures, digital records or other methods — sufficiently to harm military interests would face a prison sentence of one to seven years.
The ministry added that, in the past few years, the military has collaborated with national security agencies to crack down on Chinese spying, which showed that the CCP’s espionage and spying activities are becoming more rampant.
In most of the spying cases, active military personnel were induced by money, investments or gambling and were asked to sign documents or film videos to pledge their loyalty to the enemy, which seriously harms national security, it said.
The Ministry plans to submit the bill to the Executive Yuan for review once all legal procedures are completed, according to the Taipei Times. The proposed bill emphasizes that active military personnel have a constitutional duty to remain loyal to the nation, protect its citizens, and safeguard national security.
Under the Constitution and other laws, active military personnel must be loyal to the nation, protect its citizens and diligently perform their duty to safeguard national security, the ministry said.
A few members of the military have committed treason and unlawful acts, and under the new bill, they would not only be despised by the public, they would also not escape the law, it said.
(Inputs from ANI)
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