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The UN last month rescinded her application to attend after weeks of negotiations in which her protests that she was not Chinese were ignored, Lin said.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.
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