The UN Correspondents Associa-tion (UNCA) is preparing for a showdown with UN officials on Wednesday over its intention to hold a video-conference with Pres-ident Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), despite efforts by China and the UN to prevent the electronic meeting from taking place on UN property.
UNCA president Anthony Jenkins told the Taipei Times that the issue at stake was freedom of the press and that his association plans to proceed with the videoconference.
Having received two letters from the UN secretariat pledging to block the conference, Jenkins was drafting a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Friday to make the case that China has no right to stand in the way of press activity.
In the letters to Jenkins, Shashi Tharoor, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, cited UN Resolution 2758 as legal justification for blocking Chen's videoconference. That was the 1971 resolution that switched the UN's China seat from Chiang Kai-shek's (
In a telephone interview from New York, Jenkins said he will be arguing that the resolution does not apply and that the issue is not a legal one at any rate.
The UNCA plans to hold the conference in the association's clubroom inside the UN headquarters. Tharoor has suggested the press conference take place at the Millennium Plaza Hotel across the street from the UN.
In one letter, Tharoor wrote that "the issue of Taiwan is an extremely grave one in which the Secretariat is bound by the unambiguous resolution of the General Assembly. Inviting the presence, even `virtual,' at the United Nations, of the head of this purported `state' is no ordinary matter.
"In this context, if such a meeting were to take place on UN premises, it would place UNCA members in the position of creating the news rather than reporting it, of becoming political agents rather than objective observers," Tharoor wrote.
The UNCA board rejected this argument out of hand and voted to go ahead with the conference.
It felt that "the Secretariat trying to tell us who we can meet with is an unacceptable infringement of the freedom of the press," Jenkins said.
But, Jenkins noted, "clearly the Secretariat is under enormous pressure from Beijing on this issue."
The press conference, if it takes place, will coincide with the introduction of a resolution by 26 countries asking that the matter of Taiwan's membership be put on the agenda, a proposition that Jenkins says will fail.
How the Secretariat might block the teleconference is another matter. Previously, when the UNCA tried to have Andrew Hsia, the head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, participate in a panel discussion on Taiwan's membership bid in the UN building, security guards prevented them from entering the premises.
This time, without Taiwan representatives present, the correspondents cannot be barred from entering the building. But Jenkins noted that in 1989, when the association tried to hold a press conference with a group of Chinese dissidents after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Secretariat, at the behest of Beijing, locked the UNCA club door and prevented them from entering. Jenkins suggests that this is what may happen this time.
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