Taiwan lodges protests after it’s barred from steel industry event in Europe

Taipei blames Beijing for putting pressure on organisers to exclude the island from meeting in Brussels

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Senior government officials from Mexico, the EU, Japan, the United States, the OECD and Belgium attend a meeting discussing excess capacity in the global steel sector. Taiwan says it was excluded from the afternoon session. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:36pm, 20 Apr 2016Updated: 1:41pm, 20 Apr 2016

Taiwan has lodged protests against mainland China, Belgium and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development after the island was pressured to pull out of an international symposium on the steel industry on Monday in Brussels, a Taiwanese official said.

Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry asked the Mainland Affairs Council, the island’s representative office in Belgium and its diplomatic mission in France where the OECD is based, to lodge the protests, the official said.

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“We find it unacceptable,” said Michael Hsu, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s Department of International Organisations, at a press conference on Tuesday.

Hsu said Taiwan has been taking part in the OECD steel committee meeting as an observer since 2005 and as a participant since 2013, so it should have been able to attend as scheduled.

The OECD also organised with the Belgian authorities a symposium on excess capacity in the steel sector in Brussels on Monday.

The Taiwanese delegation attended the morning session, but Beijing pressured the Belgian government to bar its participation in the afternoon session, according to Eleanor Wang, a spokeswoman at the Foreign Ministry.

The meetings brought together ministers and other high-level government officials in charge of policies relating to the steel industry, the OECD said on its website.