Dr. Tedros's exquisite dilemma
Beijing appears confident that it will be able to keep Taiwan from securing observer status in this month’s World Health Assembly (the annual gathering of all WHO members):
China, under its “one China” policy, considers Taiwan a breakaway province ineligible for state-to-state relations or membership of bodies like the WHO. Taiwan has diplomatic relations with only 15 countries, almost all small and developing.
Six of the WHO’s 194 member states had proposed inviting Taiwan as an observer to the WHA meeting, the WHO’s principal legal officer, Steven Solomon, told a U.N. briefing in Geneva on Friday.
The backstory of Taiwan and the World Health Organization is a tangled one. After assuming the China seat at the United Nations in the early 1970s, China successfully resisted Taiwan’s attempts to achieve representation at international organizations. Beginning in the early 1990s, Taiwan took a particular interest in the WHO, however, and made repeated bids (under slightly different names) for observer status. From 2009-2016, during a warmer period in their relations, Beijing finally agreed to Taiwanese participation in Assembly meetings. But that acquiescence is long gone and absent a nod from Beijing, Taiwan faces an uphill struggle.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called on member states to back Taipei’s bid, and there are some signs of gathering support. As The Diplomat reports:
Australia and New Zealand have joined the United States in pushing for Taiwan’s observer status. “They have got something to teach the rest of the world, and every country including China must surely want to know the secret of the success,” New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said Thursday.
Now comes news that Canada is joining the campaign for Taiwan’s participation:
Canada approved a verbal demarche to two senior WHO executives during a meeting Thursday that urged them to allow Taiwan to be admitted as an observer to an upcoming meeting because its input would be “meaningful and important.”
A senior government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said the demarche was issued jointly on Thursday by the Geneva-based ambassadors of Canada, Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, Britain, Japan and the U.S., with the envoys from Washington and Tokyo taking the lead.
While the movement to include Taiwan is gaining steam, it seems unlikely that it will spread far or fast enough to garner a majority or supermajority of WHO members. And that political reality makes WHO Secretary General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus a central player in the drama. The World Health Assembly rules suggest that he has the discretion to extend an invitation on his own. Rule 3 provides:
The Director-General may invite States having made application for membership, territories on whose behalf application for associate membership has been made, and States which have signed but not accepted the Constitution to send observers to sessions of the Health Assembly.
There is ambiguity embedded in even that brief provision, most fundamentally whether Taiwan should be considered a state. And whatever his formal authority, the confrontation puts the Secretary General in an acute political dilemma, stuck between the insistence of the United States and several of its allies and the resistance of China. Leaders of international organizations—which are, after all, creatures of their members states—avoid these kinds of choices at all costs. The WHO leadership will be desperate for a compromise solution.