Basic human rights were seriously contravened when the UN turned away a Taiwanese rights advocate from the World Summit for Social Development in Qatar, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
The ministry made the comment a day after Vivi Lin (林薇), who advocates gender equality, wrote on social media that she was barred from attending the event, which ran from Tuesday to yesterday, for holding a Taiwanese passport.
The UN framework has long denied Taiwanese the human right to attend global public affairs events, the ministry said.
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ office has not yet responded meaningfully to Taiwan’s demands to fix the situation lodged via allies and like-minded countries, it said.
The ministry continues to fight for the rights of Taiwanese through all channels and urges the UN to resist China’s use of coercion in international affairs, which runs against the UN Charter’s spirit of equal rights for all, it said.
The UN should swiftly rectify the unjustified discrimination of Taiwanese, the ministry said.
Lin said she had been invited to address the summit on issues concerning gender equity on behalf of a non-governmental organization recognized as an advisory group by the UN.
After submitting personal information for her security background check, Lin received a letter stating that she had misreported her nationality and must correct the mistake to be admitted to the event, she said, adding that the letter bore the signature of a UN official with an apparently Chinese name spelled in English.
“The point of the Chinese UN employee’s signature on the letter was to show that Beijing has people everywhere,” Lin said.
Taiwanese completing UN security background checks typically report themselves as stateless or leave the nationality column blank, because Taiwan, or the Republic of China, are not among the available options, Lin said.
The system is set up is to coerce Taiwanese into identifying themselves as citizens of the People’s Republic of China, she said.
The UN last month rescinded her application to attend after weeks of negotiations in which her protests that she was not Chinese were ignored, Lin said.
The rejection signaled an intensification in Beijing’s efforts to bar Taiwanese from international spaces, she said.
Rejecting Taiwanese contradicts the UN’s mission of leaving no one behind, she added.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Taiwan Railways Corp (TRC) today announced that Shin Kong Mitsukoshi has been selected as the preferred bidder to operate the Taipei Railway Station shopping mall, replacing the current operator, Breeze Development Co Ltd. Among eight qualified firms that delivered presentations and were evaluated by a review committee, Shin Kong Mitsukoshi was ranked first, while Breeze was named the runner-up, the rail company said in a statement. Contract negotiations are to proceed in accordance with regulations, it said, adding that if negotiations with the top bidder fail, it could invite the second-ranked applicant to enter talks. Breeze in a statement today expressed doubts over
RSS