Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, President of Portugal, and Keriako Tobiko, Cabinet Secretary, Kenya’s Ministry of Environment and Forests, applaud during the closing of the 2022 UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on July 1, 2022. REUTERS/Rodrigo Antunes/File Photo

LISBON, July 1 (Reuters) – A representative of Palau, a small Pacific country, on Friday denounced the United Nations for not allowing Taiwanese nationals to be part of its delegation to the Ocean Conference in Lisbon.

“The UN has excluded Taiwan’s 23 million people from the conversation,” the delegate said during the conference’s closing ceremony. “They weren’t given badges and weren’t allowed to join our delegation just because they hold Taiwanese passports.

“We view this as a violation of our sovereign rights…ocean issues are global issues and we call on all of us to work together without discrimination.”

Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, is not a UN member and its citizens cannot attend UN events as representatives of Taiwan, which is largely excluded from international organizations including China. is a member.

A US delegate said it was a “long-standing practice that each member state can decide the composition of their delegation”, adding that it was up to Palau and Tuvalu, which also saw their Taiwanese members blocked, to decide whether or not to include people from Taiwan.

“No accreditation committee should have pressured them to remove these people from their delegations,” the US delegate said.

Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister Simon Kofe withdrew from the conference after China challenged the accreditation of three Taiwanese delegates included in the Tuvalu delegation, Radio New Zealand reported on Monday. Read more

After Palau’s intervention, the Chinese representative said it was “regrettable” that the Taiwan “issue” had been brought up, adding, “Taiwan is part of China and cannot attend a conference of the UN”.

Reporting by Catarina Demony; Editing by David Gregorio

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