It all started with a dispute between Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defence Procurement Bureau and a company called Strategic Technologies Private Limited in Singapore. That company won the case in Singapore using the “Taiwan isn’t a country” argument and won. ST then took that argument to France, that’s how this court ruling came about.
I can’t speak or read French to save my life… so…
Google Translation:
A French court granted ROC independence? I bet this has got China’s ruling Politburo shaking in their boots.
Now maybe we can get a court in Sealand to grant Taiwan independence.
Victory is ours!
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One more such victory and we are lost.
I don’t think there’s anything revolutionary here. Few deny that the ROC is an independent state; they just don’t recognize it.
The US similarly doesn’t recognize Cuba or North Korea, but that doesn’t mean they don’t think those countries exist.
The French court rules the ROC as a sovereign state of which Taiwan is 1 of its territories.
The French court rules that Taiwan is a sovereign state, though not recognised by the French Republic, but that international courtesy towards an independent states requires certain measures of respect of sovereignty and thus the assignment here debated is considered null and void, as Taiwan being a sovereign state, any disrespect towards it represents a breach of articles 114 of the civil law. (Which states general rules of vices of form.)
Technically the court said outloud what everybody knows and Lee Kuan-yew does not like to hear on his island-kingdom.
US courts have ruled the same way. E.g. in Jung Tang v CCC, the court ruled that CCC is part of TECRO, which in turn is part of a foreign state (which the court called Taiwan). Although acknowledging that the US does not formally recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country, the court said that for the purposes of the relevant US laws Taiwan had to be treated the same as any other foreign sovereign country.
See the court ruling below:
[quote=“Hokwongwei”]I don’t think there’s anything revolutionary here. Few deny that the ROC is an independent state; they just don’t recognize it.
The US similarly doesn’t recognize Cuba or North Korea, but that doesn’t mean they don’t think those countries exist.[/quote]
Not the same thing. The US recognize both Cuba and North Korea to be sovereign states. No official diplomatic relations does not equal to not recognizing them. The lack of official diplomatic relation only means that there is no US embassy in Havana and Pyongyang and vice versa, the interests of US citizens are represented by Sweden in North Korea and Switzerland in Cuba.
However, both Japan and South Korea do not recognize North Korea and claim that there’s only one sovereign regime in the Korean peninsula. That’s more like how China and Taiwan are like right now, though not exactly the same as well since most countries out there recognize both North and South Korea, while Taiwan and China is a zero-sum game.
Anyway these foreign courts always rule Taiwan as a sovereign state because it is functioning as one, British court had the same conclusion not so long ago. They usually would say “Taiwan has been a de facto country for decades and has evolved into a democracy” etc. However that does not change the position of their administration at all. The former is legal, the latter is purely political.