Taiwan, the UN, WHO, and press freedom
Sorry the first time around on this the file was one large graf.
Hopefully this corrects the situation. -- DEKIf it’s May it must be time for the annual ritual of the World Health Organization to deny about 12 million people the right to hear about the WHO’s annual gathering from their own media outlets.
In recent years the WHO – a United Nations’ body – has been adhering strictly to the letter of the UN’s press guidelines, which state that media credentials may only be issued to states or organizations recognized by the United Nations.
So that means the media outlets affiliated with Tamil Tigers, the PLO, and half a dozen other organizations may have reporters present. It also means that reporters from the free and independent media of Taiwan are banned from the WHO and the UN.
You might think that banning the media from the only Chinese speaking democracy flies in the face of
Article 19 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
And you would be right.
The problem is the UN Charter and the UDHR have little to do with each other.
And then there is that little problem of China working overtime to make sure that Taiwan is kept isolated from the rest of the world.
(Quick history lesson: When the Nationalists lost the civil war to the Communists in 1949, the Nationalists set up shop in Taiwan. Both groups – Nationalists and Communists claimed to represent all of China. Until the 1970s and 1980s, most of the world accepted the Nationalists as the “rightful” Chinese government. That all changed and now less than a couple dozen countries recognize Taiwan as China.
Until the late 1980s, Taiwan was just as much a dictatorship as mainland China. That all changed in the early 1990s. While the rest of the world was watching the demise of the Soviet Union and its empire, Taiwan quietly and peacefully moved from a Stalinist form of government to a vibrant and lively democracy.
This move to democracy was sealed by 2000 when the government changed hands from the KMT to DPP. This represented the first time in 5,000 years of Chinese history that power moved from one party to another without heredity or violence.
Thus endeth the lesson.)
The only other Chinese-speaking entity in the world where the media are free and where political dissent is openly displayed and allowed is Hong Kong.
For a number of years the SPJ has called for the WHO and the United Nations to allow reporters for Taiwanese news outlets to cover their proceedings. Apparently, however, apparently under steady pressure from China, anyone with ANY affiliation to a Taiwanese publication is denied press credentials.
At first the WHO just banned Taiwanese passport holders from getting credentials – Taiwan is not recognized by the UN.
Then it became anyone working for a Taiwan news outlet.
One has to assume the decision to keep out the Taiwanese media is strictly a political one and one that caters to Beijing. It certainly cannot be because the WHO deliberately wants to violate Article 19.
Just why the WHO is acting so subservient to China is a real skull scratcher.
Let us not forget, it was the free media of Hong Kong that first reported a new virus affecting people with flu-like symptoms. The common factor to all the people affected was that they all visited certain areas of China.
The Chinese government denied there was any such outbreak. They jailed Chinese editors and reporters who tried to report on this outbreak and then once the story finally did break Chinese authorities stonewalled the WHO and the rest of the world in trying to determine the source and cause of the disease.
Of course, this was the famous SARS outbreak of 5 years ago.
And now local and national Chinese authorities are once again obstructing international efforts to find out more about the additives a Chinese manufacturer put into pet food that caused the deaths of a number of American pets.
What makes this latest example so problematic is that the same additive is put in human food for export to the States and Europe.
Once again, there are reports that journalists trying to uncover more information on this issue are being harassed by government authorities.
The bottom line is that the Taiwanese people would like to hear about the latest issues of the WHO from their own reporters without having to go through the filter of Beijing or a Western news organization.
The 12 million people of Taiwan deserve to enjoy the rights as enumerated in Article 19: “Everyone has the right … to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”