Nigeria among countries where Chinese ‘police stations’ torture fraudulent nationals
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Nigeria is among several countries across five continents where Beijing operates police “service stations” where Chinese nationals who commit crime in those countries are detained and punished and arrangements made for their repatriation.
The illegal secret police stations are in more than 20 countries in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Africa – and the human rights violations are carried out with the connivance of some authorities, alerts Safeguard Defender.
The rights group disclosed this in a report titled, “110 Overseas Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild”.
The police stations are created to bring “down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese,” the report explained, naming Nigeria, Lesotho, and Tanzania in Africa among countries with such facilities.
Safeguard Defender said:
“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.’”
As part of campaign to combat fraud by Chinese citizens living abroad, the report added, Chinese authorities claimed 230,000 nationals were “persuaded to return” to China between April 2021 and July 2022 to face criminal proceedings.
Beijing 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, per reporting by Vanguard.
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Worldwide phenomenon
Safeguard Defender disclosed China selected nine countries as having serious fraud, telecom fraud, and web crimes, and Chinese nationals are 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.’”
However, the setting up of overseas police “service stations” is 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”.
Safeguard also noted 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.”