A rights advocate yesterday said that a 2010 request from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) not to criticize China only made him want to speak out even more.
“You don’t typically tell an activist to be quiet on a subject of human rights. You know, it’s just a terrible idea,” Oslo Freedom Forum founder Thor Halvorssen told a news conference in Taipei before the start of this year’s half-day forum.
Halvorssen, who is also the founder and chief executive of the US-based Human Rights Foundation, said that the ministry pleaded with him not to say anything negative about China in a conference speech in Taipei 13 years ago.
Photo: Yang Yao-ru, Taipei Times
He said the request was counterproductive, resulting in him rewriting his speech the night before the conference to include more criticisms of China, taking aim at the Chinese Communist Party for being “the most criminal syndicate that violates human rights in the world.”
Ma and his entourage “got up and walked out” five minutes into the speech, he said.
In a meeting on Monday with Legislative Speaker You Si-kun (游錫?), Halvorssen said that he was kicked out of his hotel in retaliation for the speech.
That led Democratic Progressive Party lawmakers to demand that Ma apologize for his administration’s alleged treatment of Halvorssen.
Ma Ying-jeou Foundation director Hsiao Hsu-tsen (蕭旭岑) on Tuesday said that Halvorssen had been clear in his recounting on Monday that it was the ministry and not Ma who had asked him about his speech in 2010.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it respects Halvorssen’s personal remarks and views, but has no further comment on the matter.
The Oslo Freedom Forum is a series of international human rights conferences launched by the Human Rights Foundation in 2009.
The conferences aim to bring together notable people, including former heads of state, Nobel Peace Prize laureates, prisoners of conscience and other public figures to network and exchange ideas about human rights and exposing dictatorships, its Web site says.
This year’s speakers in Taipei included Cuban freelance writer Abraham Jimenez Enoa, who has written for the Washington Post and cofounded the online magazine El Estornudo, one of the first independent Cuban outlets dedicated to literary journalism; Dalia Hatuqa, a journalist specializing in Israeli-Palestinian affairs, regional Middle East issues and US foreign policy; and Mzwandile Masuku, a Swazi human rights lawyer and the son of late prominent opposition leader Mario Masuku.
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