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CY holds press conference announcing investigation
The Control Yuan (CY) Transportation and Procurement Affairs Committee has reviewed and approved an investigation report pointing out that traffic accidents have long been the leading cause of fatal injuries among children in Taiwan. The population of children in Taiwan has experienced negative growth for two consecutive years. However, the number of casualties in traffic accidents has increased rather than decreased in the past four years.
The Executive Yuan (EY) has listed reducing the number of accidental deaths in traffic accidents among young people as one of the eight human rights issues in the National Human Rights Action Plan, calling on the Ministries of Transportation & Communications, Health & Welfare, Education, and the Interior to establish a monitoring mechanism and implement a “3E Policy” (Education, Enforcement, and Engineering) for traffic safety.
The EY and CY have also called for greater emphasis on human-centric transportation and children’s right to life and safety, building a safe and friendly transportation environment for future generations.
The World Health Organization has stated that road traffic injuries are a major but often neglected public health problem. The independent assessment of the National Human Rights Commission’s second national report noted that Taiwan lacks comprehensive data on the injury of children in accidents, only listing relevant death statistics.
This makes the data difficult to apply to injury prevention. As such, the EY should work with the Ministry of Health and Welfare and other relevant ministries to review the effectiveness of the Implementation Plan for Child and Youth Safety and revise its goals accordingly, improving the functionality of coordination meetings on the prevention of accidents involving children and adolescents. It also proposed establishing a monitoring mechanism for accident injuries affecting children.
In recent years, Taiwan has actively promoted the concept of “human-centric transportation,” making the concept of respecting the disadvantaged, protecting pedestrians, and allowing people and vehicles to use the road fairly and reasonably the focus of modern urban road planning, putting into practice a long-term implementation of 3E policy.
The CY further suggested that the EY should make reference to the Convention on the Rights of the Child in regarding children as the main focus of traffic accident prevention policies, and supervise ministries and local governments in strengthening the emphasis on children’s right to safety, so as to more fully implement the concept of human-centric transportation.
Source: Control Yuan, Taiwan
