China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday.
At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is through the “secret conditionality” of its donations to the governing body, Reilly wrote.
Photo: Screen grab from parliamentlive.tv’s Web site
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) “imposes a secret conditionality across UN agencies that the monies so provided may not be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan,” she said.
“Essentially, the PRC instumentalises the UN to increase pressure on” small island developing states and least developed countries, “which account for a majority of states that still have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, to transfer their allegiance to the PRC,” she said.
The “Chief of the Human Rights Council Branch in OHCHR, a French national, was secretly providing the PRC with advance information on which human rights activists planned to attend the Human Rights Council,” Reilly wrote.
That information included British citizens and residents, she added.
The families of non-governmental organization (NGO) delegates were visited by Chinese police and “forced to phone them to tell them to stop their advocacy, arbitrarily arrested, placed under house arrest for the period of the meeting, disappeared, sentenced to long prison terms without cause, tortured, or, as regards Uyghurs, put in concentration camps,” she said.
Some individuals had died in detention, and “in at least one case, the Chinese government issued an Interpol red notice against an NGO delegate,” she said.
Regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, Reilly said that WHO and UN Environment Programme reports on the origins of COVID-19 “were edited to reduce references to the possibility of a laboratory leak.”
She also included in her “written evidence” a British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office report that said that China is working to “shape the multilateral system to align more with a state-centric, authoritarian world view.”
Tuesday’s inquiry aimed to follow up on a 2021 report by the committee, which concluded that autocratic states were attempting to aggressively co-opt strategically important multilateral organizations and to fundamentally redefine their founding principles.
In Taipei, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday thanked Reilly for speaking out.
“Thank you, @EmmaReillyTweet, for speaking out on how the #PRC corrupts the @UN& the rules-based order. #Taiwan is a known victim of #China’s wrongdoing, but in reality the whole world suffers. We need this brought up in the #G7, #EU & other bodies to counter this evil empire,” it wrote on X.
Two US House of Representatives committees yesterday condemned China’s attempt to orchestrate a crash involving Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim’s (蕭美琴) car when she visited the Czech Republic last year as vice president-elect. Czech local media in March last year reported that a Chinese diplomat had run a red light while following Hsiao’s car from the airport, and Czech intelligence last week told local media that Chinese diplomats and agents had also planned to stage a demonstrative car collision. Hsiao on Saturday shared a Reuters news report on the incident through her account on social media platform X and wrote: “I
‘BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS’: The US military’s aim is to continue to make any potential Chinese invasion more difficult than it already is, US General Ronald Clark said The likelihood of China invading Taiwan without contest is “very, very small” because the Taiwan Strait is under constant surveillance by multiple countries, a US general has said. General Ronald Clark, commanding officer of US Army Pacific (USARPAC), the US Army’s largest service component command, made the remarks during a dialogue hosted on Friday by Washington-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Asked by the event host what the Chinese military has learned from its US counterpart over the years, Clark said that the first lesson is that the skill and will of US service members are “unmatched.” The second
STANDING TOGETHER: Amid China’s increasingly aggressive activities, nations must join forces in detecting and dealing with incursions, a Taiwanese official said Two senior Philippine officials and one former official yesterday attended the Taiwan International Ocean Forum in Taipei, the first high-level visit since the Philippines in April lifted a ban on such travel to Taiwan. The Ocean Affairs Council hosted the two-day event at the National Taiwan University Hospital International Convention Center. Philippine Navy spokesman Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad, Coast Guard spokesman Grand Commodore Jay Tarriela and former Philippine Presidential Communications Office assistant secretary Michel del Rosario participated in the forum. More than 100 officials, experts and entrepreneurs from 15 nations participated in the forum, which included discussions on countering China’s hybrid warfare
MORE DEMOCRACY: The only solution to Taiwan’s current democratic issues involves more democracy, including Constitutional Court rulings and citizens exercising their civil rights , Lai said The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is not the “motherland” of the Republic of China (ROC) and has never owned Taiwan, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday. The speech was the third in a series of 10 that Lai is scheduled to deliver across Taiwan. Taiwan is facing external threats from China, Lai said at a Lions Clubs International banquet in Hsinchu. For example, on June 21 the army detected 12 Chinese aircraft, eight of which entered Taiwanese waters, as well as six Chinese warships that remained in the waters around Taiwan, he said. Beyond military and political intimidation, Taiwan