China opens police station in Nigeria
In an effort to combat the increasing criminal activities of its citizens abroad, the Chinese government has opened police stations in Nigeria and over 20 other countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
This was revealed in a report titled ‘110 Overseas Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild.’
According to media reports, the police stations were established to crack down on “all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese.”
Apart from Nigeria, the other African countries with Chinese police stations are Lesotho and Tanzania.
“Rather than cooperating with local authorities in 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 organizations in the illegal methods employed to pursue ‘fugitives,’” according to the Safeguard Defender report.
It went on to say that as part of a massive nationwide campaign to combat fraud and telecommunication fraud committed by Chinese citizens living abroad, Chinese authorities claimed that between April 2021 and July 2022, 230,000 nationals were “persuaded to return” to face criminal proceedings in China.
China’s official statements clarified the use of depriving suspects’ children of their right to education in China, as well as other actions against relatives and family members, as part of a full-fledged “guilt by association” campaign.
China opens police station in Nigeria
According to the rights group, China designated nine countries as having serious fraud, telecom fraud, and web crimes, and Chinese nationals were no longer permitted to remain in those countries without “good reason.”
“While establishing these operations to track down those accused of fraud and telecommunications fraud, China identified nine countries that were especially prone to hosting Chinese nationals engaged in such criminal activities, the ‘nine forbidden countries,’” the Safeguard explained.
The establishment of overseas police service stations, on the other hand, was a worldwide phenomenon, with the majority of such being in western democratic nations, with a particular focus on Europe, rather than in the ‘nine forbidden countries.’
The group also stated that abandoning any “pretext of due process or 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 has now become an endemic problem.”
“Whether the targets are dissidents, corrupt officials, or low-level criminals, the problem remains the same: In China, the use of irregular methods — often combining carrots and sticks — against the targeted individual or their family members undermines any due process and the most basic rights of suspects,” Safeguard Defender added.