Lawmakers clash on alimony issue
By Jonathan Chin / Staff writer, with CNA
Lawmakers on Thursday disagreed with a government-proposed measure to stop alimony payments to recipients who have remarried, a rift that could delay Cabinet-backed Civil Code reforms.
Ministry of Justice officials and legislators butted heads over the right to alimony at a hearing on the proposed changes to laws governing marriage and divorce at the Legislative Yuan’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee.
Deputy Minister of Justice Huang Mou-hsin (黃謀信) told lawmakers that divorcees who remarry should not need continued financial support from their former spouse.
Deputy Minister of Justice Huang Mou-hsin, left, attends a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee in Taipei on Thursday last week.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
The Cabinet’s draft act does not make financial hardship the sole metric for alimony eligibility, he said in response to criticism from Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Fan Yun (范雲).
The draft act’s reference to hardship was meant to ensure divorcees in urgent financial need would receive alimony; it does not bar divorcees in other circumstances from access to such payments, Huang said.
Fan said the ministry should remove references to financial hardship altogether, as the standard could prevent people who were not poor, but otherwise deserving, from receiving alimony.
The ministry should reconsider the proposal to terminate the right to alimony upon the recipient’s remarriage, she said.
Remarriage would not make up for the career opportunities and income divorcees lost due to their previous marriage, which spousal support payments were intended to compensate, Fan said.
Lawyer Chien Jung-tsung (簡榮宗) told the hearing that the bill conflated subsistence support and financial losses incurred from the division of labor within a marriage, which are separate causes for awarding alimony.
The draft act stipulates that people who intermittently cohabited for three years out of a five-year period should be deemed to have entered a spousal relationship with potential for alimony payments upon the relationship’s break up.
Lawmakers and lawyers present at the hearing agreed with the proposal.
Juvenile and Family Department Director-General Lien Yu-chun (連育群) voiced objections, saying that cumulative cohabitation would be difficult to prove in court.
Allowing litigants to present and dispute the length of a discontinuous relationship would significantly increase the time the court needs to render a ruling for lawsuits, which would be detrimental to judicial efficiency, he said.
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