WikiLeaks on Thursday last week published a confidential cable dated Sept. 9, 2009, from the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), which showed President Ma Ying-jeou and various officials had all directly raised the matter of Taiwan's participation in the UNFCCC before the bid was made public with the AIT.
The cable shows that Taiwan was hoping the US could play a “helpful" role in supporting UNFCCC participation for the country, and proposed a strategy whereby Taiwan should take part in the mechanism as an “emissions entity" as opposed to a “state."
This strategy was largely based on Taiwan's success in joining international fisheries agreements as a “fishing entity" and aimed to circumvent the rule that only states could join the UNFCCC, the AIT cable quoted Paul Chang, then the director-general of the Department of International Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as saying.
Environmental Protection Administration Minister Stephen Shen told the AIT that Beijing objected to Taiwan's participation in the UNFCCC because China did not have specific carbon emission reduction targets while Taiwan did, and that Taiwan's positive stance and active participation in the UNFCCC would thus be an “embarrassment" to China, the cable says.
In a non-paper submitted to the AIT, Taipei said climate change was a transborder issue that required a global solution and it was therefore appropriate to define contributors to the problem (and solution) as “emissions entities," rather than necessarily as states, the cable says. Read the full report here.
Source: by Shih Hsiu-chuan, Staff Reporter, Taipei Times.
