The Chinese government has opened police stations in Nigeria and more than 20 other countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa in its bid to stem rising criminal incidents involving its citizens abroad.
A human rights watchdog named Safeguard Defenders disclosed this in its latest report titled, ‘110 Overseas Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild’, saying that the stations were established across Africa, Europe, and America, among others.
The report noted that apart from Nigeria, the other African countries where China has set up its international ‘police stations’ are Lesotho and Tanzania.
Safeguard Defenders revealed that China prefers to cooperate with United Front - linked overseas '' NGOs or civil society associations '' across the five continents in setting up alternative policing and judicial systems within third countries.
The report further said that rather than cooperate with local authorities in full respect of territorial sovereignty, China engages these organizations directly in the illegal methods it employs to pursue '' fugitives."
"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 Defenders stated.
The rights group disclosed that China has claimed that from April 2021 to July 2022, 230,000 of its nationals had been “persuaded to return” to face criminal charges in the country as part of a massive nationwide campaign to fight fraud and telecommunications fraud by its citizens living abroad.
An official statement by Chinese authorities also 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.
“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, " said the rights group.
According to the rights group, China barred its citizens from staying, without "good reason," in nine selected countries that it deems as having serious fraud, telecom fraud, and web crimes.
“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 Defenders said.
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