The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is still reviewing a new agreement proposed by the South African government last month to regulate the status of reciprocal representative offices, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said yesterday.
Asked about the latest developments in a year-long controversy over Taiwan’s de facto representative office in South Africa, Lin during a legislative session said that the ministry was consulting with legal experts on the proposed new agreement.
While the new proposal offers Taiwan greater flexibility, the ministry does not find it acceptable, Lin said without elaborating.
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The ministry is still open to resuming retaliatory measures against South Africa, including controls on chip exports, pending bilateral talks on the proposed agreement, he said.
He was referring to a decision made last month by the Ministry of Economic Affairs to require government approval for the export of 47 tech products, including integrated circuits, to South Africa, which was later halted.
The planned restrictions were meant as a countermeasure to South Africa’s repeated downgrading and renaming of Taiwan’s two de facto representative offices there, with the government saying Pretoria was yielding to Beijing’s efforts to belittle the nation’s sovereignty.
Two days after the measures were announced, the foreign ministry said it had asked the economic ministry to suspend implementation of the controls, pending discussions with South Africa.
The problem began in October last year, when the South African government began a unilateral push to categorize the Taipei Liaison Office in South Africa as a “trade office” and move it from the administrative capital, Pretoria, to the commercial capital, Johannesburg.
South Africa first wanted the office to relocate almost immediately, but later extended the deadline to the end of March this year.
The foreign ministry protested the proposed relocation, citing a bilateral agreement that allowed the Taipei office to operate in Pretoria after diplomatic ties between the two countries were severed in 1998.
It also called for talks to come up with a new agreement regarding the operations of the office, but no such discussions were held and office was renamed in early March on South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) Web site to the Taipei Commercial Office.
DIRCO on July 21 announced the renaming and downgrading of Taiwan’s main representative office in Pretoria and its branch office in Cape Town.
Taiwan’s representative office in Pretoria continues to provide services to Taiwanese in South Africa and maintains normal operations, the ministry said.
The South Africa representative office in Taiwan, called the Liaison Office of South Africa in Taipei, also continues to operate normally, officials said.
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