The prospects of Taiwan and the Philippines signing a fishery law enforcement agreement are good, Council of Agriculture (COA) Deputy Minister James Sha (沙志一) said yesterday after officials from both nations met in Manila this week to discuss fishing rights.
The meeting was to be held in Taipei, but Manila canceled the trip after a series of incidents, including a standoff between coast guard vessels from the two nations and the detention of Taiwanese fishing vessels by Philippine patrol boats.
Taipei officials led by Fisheries Agency Deputy Director-General Tsay Tzu-yaw (蔡日耀) left for Manila earlier this week to meet with their counterparts to discuss the issues and negotiate an agreement on fishery law enforcement. Participants included officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Coast Guard Administration.
Sha said the negotiators had reached a high degree of consensus and that a draft agreement has been sent to the Philippine Presidential Office for review.
He said he thinks an agreement can be signed soon, as long as the situation between the two sides continues to improve.
However, Sha said, discussions on the marine areas in which fishermen from both nations should be allowed to operate cannot take place until both sides guarantee that there should be no use of force in the event of disputes.
To this end, the draft provides guidelines for each nation to promptly notify the other of any incidents that require law enforcement in disputed waters and to guarantee to the early release of any detained boats or fishermen, Sha said.
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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