A senior EU lawmaker expressed full support for Taiwan’s bid to join the UN’s specialized agencies this year and urged the European Parliament to show goodwill toward the bid, a Brussels-based magazine said in a report on Thursday.
Center-right parliamentarian Georg Jarzembowski, chairman of the parliament’s Taiwan Friendship Group, was quoted by the Parliament Magazine on its Web site as saying he “fully endorsed” Taiwan’s move.
“It is a perfectly reasonable and well-founded request and the very least China can do. After the success of the Olympics, it would represent an appropriate goodwill gesture on the part of Beijing,” he said.
Pointing out that Taiwan’s inclusion in such organizations is vitally important not just for Taiwan but for the rest of the world, Jarzembowski said that Taiwan’s exclusion from the WHO has been detrimental to the health rights of the 23 million people of Taiwan and foreigners residing in and traveling to Taiwan.
The WHO, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) are among the 16 UN specialized bodies that Taiwan cites in its latest bid for meaningful participation in UN activities.
Taiwan failed in its previous annual bids over the past 15 years to seek full membership in the world body because of obstruction by China.
This year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government changed its strategy to focus on meaningful participation in one or more of the UN specialized agencies.
Two of the nation’s 23 diplomatic allies — St. Vincent and the Solomon Islands — submitted Taiwan’s bid proposal to the UN Secretariat on Aug. 15.
The report also quoted Edward McMillan-Scott, a vice president of the European Parliament, as saying : “I still think Taiwan should push for full membership of the UN.”
The new bid is widely seen as a crucial test to see if China accepts President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) olive branch of a diplomatic truce with Beijing.
However, Chinese Ambassador to the UN Wang Guangya (王光亞) has already blasted Taiwan’s allies for trying to put Taiwan’s UN participation bid on the General Assembly’s agenda.
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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