However, the entire delegation only found out that it could not enter yesterday after being stopped at the entrance by conference organizers who refused to renew their passes a second time, EPA officials said.
MOFA officials said they believed the ban covered all NGOs at the conference and did not single out Taiwan.
MOFA’s Chang said he believed the comprehensive ban was issued over security concerns rather than for political reasons.
This was supported in a press briefing by Chiu conducted over the telephone with reporters yesterday at the EPA.
He said that “all NGOs were barred from the leader’s conference [yesterday] due to measures taken in the name of security ... as a result most people were unable to gain entry and lots of them have left the city already.”
However, Wang Chun-hsiu (王俊秀), who attended the conference at Copenhagen as a representative from the UK-based International National Trusts Organization (INTO), told the Taipei Times that he believed major NGOs had their passes successfully renewed for yesterday’s conference.
“This ban was not instituted towards Taiwan in particular ... but a few major NGOs, including Greenpeace, had their entry passes renewed for today’s session,” Wang said. “First the [Taiwanese] media, and now the delegation ... It’s a bleak disappointment to have everyone from Taiwan barred during the final day of the conference.”
Wang is a professor at National Tsing Hua University and heads the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union (TEPU).
He attended the conference as a member of INTO because of concerns that his own organization would be labeled part of China.
Wang said that since the start of the conference, NGOs had faced problems including the limited amount of passes handed out.
“They gave us such limited amounts of passes that most organizations had to trim down their attendees by [80 to 90 percent] ... which we only found out we had to do after we arrived,” Wang said.
Despite the official response by conference organizers that the bans were because of security concerns, analysts in Copenhagen said the restrictions could have been implemented because the Bella Center — the main venue of the conference — was far too small to hold the scores of journalists, NGOs and government officials gathered.
In a press statement, Amy Ridenour from the US-based National Center for Public Policy Research, said: “To give credentials to 45,000 people while choosing a building that holds 15,000 people is insane, although the UN, to be fair, has never been known for competence.”
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