The top U.N. official rejected Taiwan’s request last year to participate in the organization’s activities, NR has learned.
The top U.N. official rejected Taiwan’s request last year to participate in the organization’s activities, NR has learned.
U .N. secretary general Antonio Guterres denied a request by allies of Taiwan to grant the country the ability to participate in U.N. activities last year, National Review has exclusively learned. He cited a 50-year-old U.N. resolution, using an interpretation favored by China, to block the effort.
Although Taiwan’s partners have sent such a request every year for the past five years amid a stepped-up Chinese diplomatic effort to isolate the island country, Guterres’s latest rejection is significant because it elicited an unusually blunt rejoinder from Taiwan.
“This example is representative of the rigidity of the Secretariat as a whole, as it appears to have no intention of meaningfully resolving the issues,” the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office of New York — a de facto diplomatic outpost — said in a statement to NR earlier this month.
Taiwan’s allies sent Guterres letters supporting Taiwan last fall. According to a press release issued by the Taiwanese foreign ministry in September, the focus of that effort, led by the 14 countries with which Taiwan held official diplomatic ties (Taiwan later lost one ally, Nicaragua, in December), was to secure Taiwan’s participation in various activities at the U.N.
Guterres responded in December, repeating a line that he used in his previous responses: “Regarding the participation of Taiwan, China, in the work of the United Nations, the Secretariat is guided by General Assembly resolution 2758 (XXVI) of 25 October 1971.”
Guterres’s use of the formulation “Taiwan, China,” is also noteworthy, because it implies that Taiwan is a region of the mainland.
Last year was not the first time that Guterres has replied to letters from Taiwan’s allies, but its disclosure this year is significant because it comes amid mounting frustration in Taipei with the U.N. official’s reluctance to break from Beijing’s position on the matter. Guterres and the U.N. leadership have come under heightened scrutiny for their relationship with the Chinese government in recent months.
In February, Guterres met Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Beijing Winter Olympics, offering effusive praise of China’s international conduct. Guterres has also faced withering criticism from human-rights groups for declining to condemn China’s genocide of Uyghurs.
While Taiwanese officials have previously been hesitant to publicly criticize the U.N. secretariat in the hopes of reaching an agreement, those efforts have fallen flat amid a renewed pressure campaign by the Chinese Communist Party’s diplomats.
In 1971, the U.N. voted to give Taiwan’s seat — called “China” — to the Communist mainland government. The resolution by which it did so specified only that the People’s Republic of China would take the seat previously held by Taiwan — it did not constitute the U.N.’s official recognition of Chinese claims over the island country.
Prior to 2016, Taiwan had maintained some level of interaction with the U.N. But after President Tsai Ing-wen, who is seen by Beijing as pro-independence, won election that year, Chinese diplomats moved decisively to block Taiwan from all forms of access to the U.N.
Since then, Taiwanese passport-holders have been almost uniformly forbidden from accessing U.N. facilities without documentation from a Chinese-government office. Beijing has also blocked Taiwan from its previous participation at gatherings of the World Health Organization, of the International Civil Aviation Organization, and of other U.N. agencies.
“The fact that Taiwan participated robustly in certain UN specialized agencies for the vast majority of the past 50 years is evidence of the value the international community places in Taiwan’s contributions,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a statement last October, urging countries to support Taiwan’s participation at the U.N.
Blinken’s statement did not directly criticize the U.N. secretariat, but it did note the fact that Taiwanese nationals have been blocked from entering the U.N. — a decision made at the discretion of U.N. leadership, based on its interpretation of the resolution enacted in 1971.
The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office said that Guterres’s interpretation of the resolution was incorrect. “In fact, the resolution is all about representation, not participation. Engagement by Taiwan in the U.N.-affiliated entities is in line with the letter and spirit of the resolution,” the office told NR. A Guterres spokesperson did not reply to an email requesting comment.
The practical consequences of Taiwan’s exclusion are dire. Taiwan’s de facto U.N. ambassador, James Lee, said during an interview with NR that his country’s exclusion from the WHO system cost “millions of lives” when Taipei’s warnings about Covid in December 2019 were ignored. Other U.N. agencies from which Taiwan is excluded set global telecom standards, international aviation regulations, and other rules.
Taiwan’s exclusion from the U.N. also means that, in the event of a Chinese invasion, its leadership will lack access to the global platform through which Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials have made poignant appeals during Russia’s attack on their country.
That, of course, is the point: Denying Taiwan standing in international organizations and poaching its allies makes it less politically painful for China to absorb the island.