News and Events

TAIPEI, Taiwan - Two years after the victory of Taiwan Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan is feeling the effects of the DPP's position against the "One China principle." At the World Health Organization, China is allegedly successfully blocking Taiwan from participating in the annual World Health Assembly, and in a number of WHO technical meetings, officials say. Beyond the political dimension of the dissent between China and Taiwan, the situation may hurt the Taiwanese and global health security, Taiwanese officials said.

“Access to genetic resources” and “the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their utilization” have beleaguered all thirteen Conferences of the Parties to the 1993 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a group of academics writes. The expression in quotes constitutes the third objective of the Convention and is intertwined with the first two, conservation and sustainable use. It goes by the acronym “ABS”. Despite 25 years of efforts and an annual bio-economy of nearly one trillion dollars, few contracts have ever been concluded. And of those very few, the monetary benefits are so low that contracting parties are loathe to disclose them. The “Brazilian ABS Law” of 2015, which came into effect on 6 November 2017, even allows royalties on net sales to be as low as one tenth of one percent. In the words of one distinguished legal scholar, Users are paying “peanuts for biodiversity.”

The United States today said China's request for dispute settlement consultations at the World Trade Organization is "baseless," as the recent US measures against imports of Chinese steel and aluminum are not safeguards and so do not warrant the $3 billion in retaliation subsequently announced by China. Nevertheless, the US said it is willing to hold consultations with China, but not related to the WTO Agreement on Safeguards.

A decision to keep third party listeners out of communications on the internet taken by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) at their recent meeting in London elicited an alarmist message from the US financial industry. The premier internet standardisation body would provide “privacy for crooks,” and practically prohibit “bank security guards from patrolling and checking particular rooms” online, BITS, the technology division of the Financial Services Roundtable, argued in a press release last week. Has standardisation gone rogue?