Lung complained that Taiwan has to "bribe" other nations to keep diplomatic ties.
"When political leaders want to visit other nations, they have to go incognito and still would be humiliated like orphans no one accepts," she said.
She also said that years of isolation has given Taiwanese "a sense of alienation from the global village."
She pointed to a recent opinion poll in Taipei, in which 80 percent of respondents didn't know where the UN headquarters was located, 60 percent did not know on which continent Athens was located, 80 percent did not know where the Nobel Prize was awarded and 60 percent did not know Germany's currency, for example.
These results showed, Lung said, that decades of isolation have denied the Taiwanese the "right to social and cultural life in the world community."
This, in turn, violates the UN universal declaration of human rights, the world's basic human rights document.
"Everybody" is entitled to basic rights and freedoms, the declaration states. "No distinction" should be made on the basis of the "political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty," Lung quoted the document as saying.
Taiwan, by the nature of its global isolation, is denied these rights because the world complies with Beijing's isolation campaign, she said.



