The president of the Association of Taiwan Journalists (ATJ) sent a letter yesterday to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan protesting the UN's move to bar reporters from Taiwan from the upcoming World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva.
In the letter, Tony Liu (呂東熹) said that freedom of the press is a universal value that the UN has vowed to uphold and that Taiwan, in its devotion to promoting democracy and world peace, should not be ostracized from the global community for political reasons.
"It is disheartening and reprehensible when an international organization that claims to hold human rights as a core principle disregards the fundamental rights of a civil society," he said.
Health issues should transcend politics, he said, adding that some mechanism could be found to allow Taiwanese journalists to cover the international event in Geneva.
"The importance of health issues, such as SARS, is far too important to allow the new application process to deny journalists from Taiwan entry to the 58th World Health Assembly," Liu wrote.
He also reminded Annan that members of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) in Athens voiced their unanimous support on May 29 last year for the right of Taiwanese journalists to cover the WHA.
On that occasion, the IFJ also passed a motion moved by the ATJ to protest the UN's refusal to allow journalists from Taiwan to cover the WHA meeting, Liu said. The WHA is the governing body of the World Health Organization.
Meanwhile, the ATJ chief also sent a letter to Reporters Sans Frontiers to express the association's outrage over how the UN Office in Geneva has infringed upon the freedom of the press after it refused to recognize journalists from Taiwan, effectively banning them from covering the upcoming WHA meeting.
Liu called on the Paris-based organization, which he described as a defender of international freedom of the press, to support Taiwan in this matter, saying that "with your support, we hope that this political intrusion of fundamental civil and human rights can be addressed."
The ATJ, founded on March 29, 1995, is a full member of the IFJ.
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:
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