The government is making every effort to obtain an invitation to the annual World Health Assembly (WHA) session next month, despite the challenges it is facing, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official said yesterday.
The WHA, the decisionmaking body of the WHO, is scheduled to hold its annual meeting in Geneva from May 22 to May 31.
The WHO secretariat has not decided whether to issue a WHA invitation to Taiwan, but the ministry will continue its efforts to express its intention to attend, Department of International Organizations Deputy Director-General Wang Liang-yu (王良玉) told a regular news briefing.
Although there are some challenges, the ministry will do its utmost to seek an invitation, she said.
The deadline for the online registration for this year’s session is May 8 and Taiwan hopes to receive an invitation by then, Wang said.
She added that the government has response measures in place, whether or not it receives an invitation.
Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) said that he would lead a delegation to Geneva to express Taiwan’s stance and promote the nation’s contributions to international health, even if Taiwan is not invited to the meeting.
Minister of Foreign Affairs David Lee (李大維) said that Taiwan would continue to push its bid to attend the WHA, although prospects do not look promising.
Many of the nation’s diplomatic allies have been helping Taiwan, he added.
Over the past eight years, Taiwan has been invited to attend the WHA as an observer.
When the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) replaced the Beijing-friendly Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government in May last year, Taiwan received a late invitation to attend the WHA that year.
However, the invitation contained an unexpected reference to UN Resolution No. 2758, passed on Oct. 25, 1971, which recognizes the People’s Republic of China as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations.”
Amid strained cross-strait ties, there have been concerns that Beijing might try to block the WHO’s invitation to Taiwan this year.
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS: As China attempted to promote its national image through humanitarian aid, its targets include New Southbound Policy countries, an expert said China’s “vaccine diplomacy,” which has become central to its foreign policy this year, might hamper Taiwan’s efforts to build relations with developing countries, an expert said. “China, as one of the few countries other than the United Kingdom and the United States to have produced a COVID-19 vaccine, will certainly use that as a diplomatic tool,” said Kung Shan-son (龔祥生), an assistant research fellow at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research. Beijing’s major goals in its “vaccine diplomacy” are to promote its national image through humanitarian aid and to solidify its relations with countries that are included in its
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center
RSS