With the 72nd Regular Session of the UN General Assembly having opened several weeks ago, it is a good time to revisit Taiwan’s campaign to join the annual WHO meeting in Geneva, Switzerland — the World Health Assembly (WHA) — as an observer.
Getting Taiwan back into the WHA is a tough call. China blocks Taiwan from attending the meeting and plays politics with the lives of the 23 million Taiwanese.
Who can forget the Chinese pressure that blocked direct WHO assistance from reaching Taiwan during the 2003 SARS crisis? China’s behavior is utterly contemptible.
The WHO has effectively taken its hands off of Taiwan’s ambitions to join the body. It has decided to let Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China work it out among themselves.
China’s diplomatic obstructionism continues to prevent Taiwan from gaining WHO membership. Where does the nation go from here?
In March, I wrote in the Taipei Times that “It behooves the US to tell Beijing that if it does not let Taiwan attend the WHA meeting, Washington will send the US secretary of Health and Human Services to Taiwan to experience firsthand how Taiwan is battling its perennial challenge of avian flu outbreaks” (“US must aid Taiwan’s WHO entry,” Mar. 3, page 8).
Based on information and knowledge of insiders, the US is committed to seeing Taiwan being represented in the WHO — and it has been for the better part of the past two decades.
The Formosan Association for Public Affairs has been promoting Taiwan’s bid for WHO membership since the late 1990s. The campaign culminated in binding legislation passing both the US House of Representatives and US Senate in 2004 authorizing the US secretary of state to initiate a plan to endorse and obtain observer status for Taiwan at the annual week-long summit of the WHO, and instruct the US delegation to Geneva to implement such a plan.
The Taiwanese government has to tackle the issue of regaining WHA observer status at the highest level. How?
The association has said for more than a decade that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs needs to create a “coalition of the willing” — a group of nations willing to stand up against China. Taiwan has to start organizing such a coalition and not wait for the US to do it.
The ministry needs to instruct each Taiwanese representative in the 34 nations that make up the WHO executive board to tell their counterparts in their host countries that Taiwan is building a coalition of nations to support its bid for an observer status at the WHA.
When the executive board meeting takes place next month, Taiwan’s diplomatic allies Swaziland and/or the Dominican Republic, both of which are on the board, unlike China, could introduce a resolution calling for Taiwan’s observer status in the WHA.
If Taiwan’s representatives have been effective and have been able to convince their counterparts to support Taiwan’s bid for an observer status in the WHA, then Taiwan would have passed the first hurdle to regaining observer status in the assembly.
After the board meeting, China will get involved and that will open up a whole new can of worms.
Peter Chen is president of the Washington-based Formosan Association for Public Affairs.
President William Lai (賴清德) attended a dinner held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) when representatives from the group visited Taiwan in October. In a speech at the event, Lai highlighted similarities in the geopolitical challenges faced by Israel and Taiwan, saying that the two countries “stand on the front line against authoritarianism.” Lai noted how Taiwan had “immediately condemned” the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas and had provided humanitarian aid. Lai was heavily criticized from some quarters for standing with AIPAC and Israel. On Nov. 4, the Taipei Times published an opinion article (“Speak out on the
Most Hong Kongers ignored the elections for its Legislative Council (LegCo) in 2021 and did so once again on Sunday. Unlike in 2021, moderate democrats who pledged their allegiance to Beijing were absent from the ballots this year. The electoral system overhaul is apparent revenge by Beijing for the democracy movement. On Sunday, the Hong Kong “patriots-only” election of the LegCo had a record-low turnout in the five geographical constituencies, with only 1.3 million people casting their ballots on the only seats that most Hong Kongers are eligible to vote for. Blank and invalid votes were up 50 percent from the previous
More than a week after Hondurans voted, the country still does not know who will be its next president. The Honduran National Electoral Council has not declared a winner, and the transmission of results has experienced repeated malfunctions that interrupted updates for almost 24 hours at times. The delay has become the second-longest post-electoral silence since the election of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez of the National Party in 2017, which was tainted by accusations of fraud. Once again, this has raised concerns among observers, civil society groups and the international community. The preliminary results remain close, but both
News about expanding security cooperation between Israel and Taiwan, including the visits of Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) in September and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) this month, as well as growing ties in areas such as missile defense and cybersecurity, should not be viewed as isolated events. The emphasis on missile defense, including Taiwan’s newly introduced T-Dome project, is simply the most visible sign of a deeper trend that has been taking shape quietly over the past two to three years. Taipei is seeking to expand security and defense cooperation with Israel, something officials
RSS