The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) would welcome support from Japan and the EU for Taiwan’s bid to gain “meaningful participation” in UN agencies, MOFA spokesman Henry Chen (陳銘政) said yesterday.
Naohiro Tsutsumi, general affairs department chief at the Taipei office of Japan’s Interchange Association, said a day earlier that Japan acknowledged and respected Taiwan’s efforts to participate in the UN.
Tsutsumi said that on condition that all parties are satisfied, Japan supported Taiwan’s efforts to obtain observer status in the World Health Assembly (WHA), the supreme decision-making body of the WHO.
Japan also supported Taiwan’s attempts to expand participation in WHO technical-level meetings, he said.
Tsutsumi said that Japan’s stance on supporting Taiwan’s participation in the WHA would not change, but he said that Japan would study whether to support Taiwan’s participation in other UN agencies on a case-by-case basis.
Meanwhile, Javier Solana, EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, has repeated the EU’s support for Taiwan’s participation in UN-affiliated agencies in letters written to two European Parliament members on Monday.
A request put forward by Taiwan’s diplomatic allies to include the issue as a supplementary item on the agenda of the 63rd session of the UN General Assembly was rejected on Sept. 17 by the UN General Committee, again because of China’s opposition.
The US mission to the UN released a statement late that day to show support for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in UN agencies.
The EU also expressed its support for Taiwan’s participation in multilateral forums on Sept. 19.
Chen said the support showed that Taiwan’s bid for meaningful participation in UN agencies has gained approval in the international community.
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