Official to testify at UK national security hearing - Taipei Times

• Staff writer, with CNA

Representative to the UK Vincent Yao (姚金祥) has been invited by the UK's Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) to testify in a hearing scheduled for tomorrow on societal resilience.

On its Web site, the UK Parliament said that Yao, along with Dutch Ambassador to the UK Paul Huijts, would give oral evidence on "their respective approaches to building national resilience, preparing their populations for civil defense and protecting their information environments and supply chains from disruption."

The JCNSS is a committee formed by senior parliamentarians who head the committees in charge of important issues, such as national defense, foreign affairs, business and trade and domestic affairs.

Photo courtesy of the Taipei Representative Office in the UK via CNA

JCNSS chair Matt Western on Friday said that societal resilience is "one of the biggest challenges" the UK faces.

"The committee's new inquiry will consider how we can build national resilience in the UK and help the public to understand the threats we face," Western said.

"We will begin by seeing what lessons we can learn from other countries, as we hear evidence from ambassadors from Taiwan and the Netherlands," he said.

It is not often that a UK committee invites the top Taiwanese diplomat in the country or a senior Taiwanese official to attend a testimony.

According to public records, former minister of science and technology Chen Liang-gee (陳良基) was invited by the UK House of Commons Education Committee in 2019 to testify and share Taiwan's experiences in artificial intelligence development.

In 2021, former legislator Jason Hsu (許毓仁) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presented online testimony to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.