Taipei, Feb. 8 (CNA) Taiwan's response to the Philippines' recent deportation of 14 Taiwanese to China sent a message to the Southeast Asian country to "take Taiwan seriously" on the diplomatic front, Foreign Minister Timothy C.T. Yang said Tuesday.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) announced Monday that it will recall Donald Lee, its envoy in Manila, and will implement stricter screening of applications by Philippine nationals seeking to work in Taiwan.
The measures were announced after the Philippines ignored Taiwan's requests and on Feb. 2 deported 14 Taiwanese fraud suspects to China.
The 14 Taiwan nationals, along with 10 Chinese suspects, were arrested in the Philippines late last year on charges of cross-border fraud against Chinese nationals.
"The impact of these measures may be limited, but we're sending a strong message to the Philippines that it should take Taiwan seriously and positively," Yang said.
The Manila Economic and Cultural Office (MECO) in Taiwan -- the Philippines representative office -- issued a statement Monday, saying that the suspects were deported to China because "all the victims are Chinese, all the accomplices are Chinese and the results can be best settled in China."
The office further said that it "deeply regrets" the involvement of Taiwanese nationals in the case.
But Yang said that while Taiwan recognized the "goodwill and regret" in the MECO statement, the Philippines has damaged its relations with Taiwan because of its handling of the case.
The fact that the Philippine side did not offer Taiwan direct communication channels to the relevant government agencies, such as the Philippines' Department of Foreign Affairs and Department of Justice, throughout the whole incident was "unacceptable," Yang said.
"All we could do was to communicate through the MECO, and that was not enough, " he said.
Yang also said that the Philippine authorities refused to grant Taiwanese officials access to a meeting on Feb. 1 to discuss the deportation issue, neither did they inform the Taiwan side of the results of another closed-door meeting until the afternoon of Feb. 2, when the Taiwanese suspects had already been deported.
That was why Taiwan decided to take countermeasures against its southern neighbor, which has around 77,000 workers in Taiwan who remit approximately US$600 million to the Philippines annually, Yang said.
Taiwan welcomed the Philippines' offer in its statement to establish a mechanism to avoid such incidents in the future, he added. (By Chris Wang) enditem /pc