International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 1 National Self-Determination and Development Protection The Peoples’ Right to Self-determination 1. Since the amendments to the Referendum Act came into effect on January 3, 2018, the threshold for a valid referendum proposal and for the number of signatures needed for the proposal petition have been relaxed significantly, thus effectively strengthening the people’s right to self-determination. Subsequent to this, when national referendum proposals were to be voted on in conjunction with local elections in 2018, a total of 38 proposals were received and 10 of them were approved. This created complications in the actual election process, wherein about 40% of polling stations nationwide failed to complete the ballot count by the scheduled deadline on the election day. Some voters were still in the process of casting their votes while the ballot count was being announced elsewhere in other localities. The fairness of this election was therefore disputed, since voters who had yet to enter the polling station could have learned about the number of votes won by the various candidates and their voting inclinations could have been affected thereby. Upon investigation of this and subsequent follow-up by the Control Yuan, the Central Election Commission lowered the threshold of the number of constituent voters set per polling station, i.e. decreasing the burden of voters to be processed at each station, and implemented it into the 2020 Taiwanese Presidential Election. 2. In the aforementioned 2018 national referendum, several proposals “on the same issue but with opposing positions” were approved to be put to the vote, without consideration of the potential conflicts in the outcomes. After the vote created such uncertainties, the Executive Yuan prepared a draft amendment with an additional paragraph to Article 29 of the Referendum Act, but this amendment is still pending for review at the Legislative Yuan. Therefore, prior to its finalization, the Executive Yuan has instructed the Central Election Commission to exercise caution when determining the referendum results. 3. Reactions from all sides to the proposed 2019 Amendment to the Referendum Act showed that the Amendment overemphasized the technicalities and details, and failed to provide an effective remedy for the substantive issues to be dealt with under the Act, which still is an inadequate mechanism for the referendum process. In order to avoid the excessive and spurious proliferation of referendum proposals and the rampant spread of disinformation, which are detrimental to the positive development of the referendum process, the Executive Yuan and the Central Election Commission were advised to consider requiring the proposer of a referedum proposal to ensure the accuracy 5