After a four-year-hiatus, Taiwan rejoined the international Kimberley Process annual meeting from Monday to Friday last week, which endeavors to eradicate the use of rough diamonds to finance wars.
Taiwan attended the plenary in Brussels as an observer, with the assistance of the EU, which hosted the event.
The Kimberley Process is a binding agreement that imposes requirements on participants through a certification scheme to safeguard shipments of rough diamonds and certify them as “conflict free.”
In 2003, the Kimberley Process started holding annual meetings and Taiwan was granted observer status in 2007.
However, Taiwan was not invited to attend in 2011, when the Democratic Republic of the Congo chaired the event, and also from 2014 to last year, when meetings were held in China, Angola, the United Arab Emirates and Australia.
The Sydney Morning Herald on May 3 last year reported that the Taiwanese delegation to that year’s Kimberley Process meeting in Perth, Western Australia, was rejected “at the behest of the Chinese delegates, who objected to their attendance.”
The delegation from China wanted to know if all participants were “formally invited,” the newspaper said.
“Backroom negotiations between the Chinese and the Australian parties ensued, then the Taiwanese delegation was asked to leave,” the Sydney Morning Herald said.
In May, the EU told the Central News Agency that under its “one China” policy and its policy objectives, it is hoped that all parties can solve the problem of Taiwan’s participation at international events in a pragmatic manner.
The EU affirmed that Taiwan is a stakeholder in the eradication of conflict diamonds and the nation was invited to the Kimberley Process annual meeting in Belgium.
Taiwan would use the name “Chinese Taipei rough-diamond-trading entity,” the EU 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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