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Fiji to host UN’s May decolonization meeting

Fiji has been selected for the 2014 Pacific Regional Seminar of the United Nations Decolonization Committee and it’s set for May 21-23. The Governor’s Office is expected to announce in early May who will represent American Samoa at the annual meeting.

 

Also known as the Special Committee of 24, the regional seminars are rotated between the Pacific and Caribbean. Last year’s seminar was held in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

 

Although American Samoa was not extended an invitation to the Caribbean seminar, Gov. Lolo Matalasi Moliga wrote to the committee, expressing his “thoughts on the political status of American Samoa and our position on the issue.”

 

“While American Samoa is a U.S. territory, the prevailing relationship avails more self-determining authority to American Samoa to make its own decisions,” he wrote. For example, he said American Samoa elects its own governor and lieutenant governor and this differentiates American Samoa from the definition of a colony.

 

The Lolo Administration hopes the committee will send an invitation this year but it remained unclear as to why the territory wasn’t invited last year.

 

The UN considers American Samoa as one of the seventeen remaining Non-Self-Governing Territories on the globe, despite the territory’s call repeatedly to be delisted as such.