Allowing the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to decide the count-ry's status, as President Chen Shui-bian (
"If we fail, the court will confirm that Taiwan is part of the People's Republic of China," said Fort Liao (
"Since the ruling is final and without appeal, could we bear the result?" he said.
Nevertheless, Liao said, it might still be worth trying.
"While we have to convince a majority of the UN's 191 member states and the 192 member states of the World Health Assembly to gain recognition in those two international organizations, the battlefield in the ICJ is relatively small because there are only 15 elected judges," Liao said.
The biggest challenge, Liao said, is convincing the court that Taiwan meets the requirements to file a case.
"Article 34 of the Statute of the ICJ says that only states may apply to and appear before the court," Liao said. "If we can make the ICJ take our case, we'll be able to prove to the world that we're an independent sovereign state, no matter what the final judgment is."
Since Taiwan is not a member of the UN, Liao said that there are several approaches the government can take.
"One possibility is to deposit with the Registrar of the Court a declaration by which we accept the jurisdiction of the court, undertake to comply with the decision of the court and abide by all the obligations of a member of the UN," Liao said.
According to Liao, there are two kinds of declarations: particular and general. A particular declaration accepts the jurisdiction of the court in a particular dispute or disputes.
A general declaration accepts the court's jurisdiction in all disputes or in a particular class of disputes, including those which may arise in the future.
Since the country is searching for a permanent standing before the ICJ, Liao said a general declaration would be better.
"We stand a good chance of having the declaration validated since the registrar has never rejected such a declaration," Liao said.
Liao, however, said that he expected to see China intervene in the court's validation process, especially now that the court's president is from China.
Robert Chen (
"The government should study the possibility of requesting the ICJ interpret the UN's General Assembly Resolution 2758 to determine Taiwan's legal standing," he said.
The resolution states that the PRC is the only lawful representative of China to the UN and that it is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council.
It also stipulates that all rights to the PRC in the UN should be restored and that representatives of Chiang Kai-shek (
"Since the resolution fails to clearly define whether Taiwan is a state, the ICJ may have its own view on the issue," he said.Also See Story:
Editorial: Idea of ICJ arbitration is appealing
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching