Tobias Sylvester
Chinese Government has opened hundreds of “overseas police service stations” around the globe, including Nigeria, to tackle the increasing criminal activities of its citizens abroad.
China Running Overseas Police Station In Nigeria
An investigative report by human rights watchdog ‘Safeguard Defenders’ titled, “110 Overseas Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild”, said the police stations were established in over 20 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
It was widely reported that the police stations are created to bring “down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese.”
Apart from Nigeria, other African nations China has set up its international ‘police stations’ are Lesotho and Tanzania, the report disclosed.
The report by Safeguard Defender revealed, “Rather than cooperating with local authorities in the full respect of territorial sovereignty, it prefers…to cooperate with (United Front-linked) overseas ‘NGOs’ or ‘civil society associations’ across the five continents, setting up an alternative policing and judicial system within third countries, and directly implicating those organisations in the illegal methods employed to pursue ‘fugitives’.”
It further said that as part of a massive nationwide campaign to combat fraud and telecommunication fraud by Chinese citizens living abroad, Chinese authorities claimed that from April 2021 to July 2022, 230,000 nationals had been, “persuaded to return” to face criminal proceedings in China.
China’s official statements clarified the use of depriving suspects’ children of the right to education back in China and other actions against relatives and family members in a full-on “guilt by association” campaign.
The rights group revealed that China selected nine countries as having serious fraud, telecom fraud and web crimes, and Chinese nationals were no longer allowed to stay in those countries without “good reason.”
“While establishing these operations to hunt down those accused of fraud and telecommunications fraud, China identified nine countries particularly prone to hosting Chinese nationals engaging in such criminal activities, the ‘nine forbidden countries’,” the Safeguard explained.
However, the setting up of overseas police ‘service stations’ was a worldwide phenomenon, with the majority of such being in western democratic nations, with a particular focus on Europe, and not in the ‘nine forbidden countries’.
The group also noted that forsaking any “pretext of due process or the consideration of suspects’ innocence until proven guilty, targeting suspects’ children and relatives in China as ‘guilty by association’ or ‘collateral damage’, and using threats and intimidation to target suspects abroad, is now itself becoming an endemic problem.”
“Whether the targets are dissidents, corrupt officials or low-level criminals, the problem remains the same: The use of irregular methods — often combining carrots with sticks — against the targeted individual or their family members in China undermines any due process and the most basic rights of suspects,” Safeguard Defender further stated.
It added: “The described treatment of targets, their families and even wider community as suspected criminals — in some cases even in the absence of any factual accusation as emerges from the ‘nine forbidden countries’ — further deprives them of the right to be considered innocent until proven otherwise and the right to a fair trial, and also institutes a far-reaching ‘guilt by association’ paradigm.”
KanyiDaily recalls that the Chinese Government had also expressed readiness to help reduce the level of poverty in Nigeria under the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
