The UN contravened its charter by asking two Central News Agency (CNA) reporters to provide Chinese passports for entry into the 77th World Health Assembly (WHA) this weekend, the Association of Taiwan Journalists said on Tuesday.
CNA’s Brussels correspondent Tien Si-ru (田習如) and Paris correspondent Judy Tseng (曾婷瑄) were asked by the UN’s media credential review committee to provide “an official Chinese passport that complies with UN policies and guidance for the UN General Assembly resolutions,” the association said.
“The UN knows very well the relations between Taiwan and China, but it still insisted that the two journalists present Chinese passports that they could not possibly have,” it said.
According to the Web site for the UN Office at Geneva: “Journalists must present a valid passport from a state recognized by the United Nations General Assembly, along with a press card.”
Therefore, the committee was arguably acting within the rules to which it is bound, regardless of how irrational and counterproductive those rules might be. The WHO has made exceptions to allow Taiwanese reporters and health officials to attend the WHA, but that is unlikely to happen again given growing pressure from China.
Taiwan’s best approach is to achieve advances in biotechnology, and then demand WHA participation in exchange for sharing those breakthroughs.
An article by BioAge Labs CEO Kristen Fortney shared on the Web site for UN Trade and Development described a UN mission to advance “longevity biotechnology, a rapidly expanding effort to develop new drugs that target aging as a root cause of disease.”
Today, one-quarter of Taiwan’s counties and municipalities are classified as “super-aged,” meaning that 20 percent or more of the people in those localities are 65 or older. Health officials are aware of this, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare has promoted its National 10-year Long-term Care Plan 2.0 since 2015 to tackle the impact of aging on society.
The government has also been promoting growth in biotechnology since former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) listed it as one of the core industries in her administration’s “five plus two” industrial innovation development program in 2016.
On Aug. 28 last year, then-premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) said the government was to “expedite the advancement of the biotech industry to transform it into the next domestic sector to hit NT$1 trillion (US$31 billion) in production value.”
It is clear that growth in biotechnology and health solutions for elderly people remain a focus of the government. Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Lin Ching-yi (林靜儀) on Wednesday said that Taiwan’s aging population is imposing a heavy burden on the National Health Insurance system, and that premiums might go up as a result.
The UN has called population aging an “irreversible global trend” that is “the inevitable result of the demographic transition — the trend towards longer lives and smaller families — that is taking place even in countries with relatively youthful populations.”
Pressure from China is likely to remain an obstacle to Taiwan’s participation in the WHA, but Taiwan could force the UN and WHO to seriously reconsider its inclusion if it makes major advances in biotechnology and healthcare for aging populations.
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