Taiwan’s ambassador to the U.S., Alexander Yui, blasted the U.N.’s exclusion of his country, saying that the global body’s slogan for its annual high-level session this year is “leave no one behind — except Taiwan.”
Yui was speaking at the Concordia Summit, an annual gathering on the sidelines of the international organization’s General Assembly for world leaders. With Taiwanese-passport holders barred from so much as even stepping foot in the U.N.’s gift shop, he and Taiwanese president William Lai delivered remarks at Concordia instead.
Beijing has long pressured top U.N. officials to accept its interpretation of a 1971 U.N. resolution as the organization’s own policy. Besides barring Taiwanese nationals from the building, Taipei is also blocked from joining other U.N.-linked initiatives. Officials from the country argue that this costs lives, with one previously telling National Review that Taiwan’s early warnings about the true nature of the Covid virus were ignored by the World Health Organization because it did not share them in its intranet system.
While Amina Mohammed, the deputy secretary-general of the U.N., said last year that member states should find a solution to Taiwan’s exclusion from the organization’s work on sustainable development, she later walked back the remarks when a staffer from a Chinese-state propaganda outlet asked her about it. This year, U.N. officials have made no such comments.
On a panel at the Concordia gathering, Yui also criticized the fact that the U.N. General Assembly held splashy sessions about the future of global governance this week, called “Summit of the Future,” without including his country in its discussions about technology. “To talk about the future of technology without incorporating Taiwan is like going to downtown New York, Little Italy, and getting a cannoli without its filling,” he said.
Taipei believes that its isolation from the body poses a pressing national-security threat. During a press conference that followed the panel, Yui told NR that China’s reigning interpretation of the resolution used to block Taiwan from the U.N. is “dangerous” because it contributes to the rationale for a future Chinese attack on Taiwan, with Beijing likely to argue that “the international community has already coincided with their one-China principle that Taiwan is part of the PRC, which is false.”
He attacked the U.N.’s leaders for endorsing China’s stance: “The United Nations secretariat, they have no right to interpret that because it’s up to the member states to do that, not them.”