China has opened up more than four dozen informal police stations across Europe and the Americas that sometimes operate as fronts to track and harass political dissidents, a new report alleges.
The report, written by Spanish-based nonprofit Safeguard Defenders, claims the Chinese Communist Party had a hand in setting up the centers called “110 overseas service stations,” after the country’s police emergency phone number.
The centers, operated by Chinese community associations on five continents in total, have been pitched as places to help Chinese nationals living abroad, as well as handle paperwork such as driver’s licenses. However, some say they are being used for more nefarious purposes.
“In general, these stations have both a good and a bad purpose,” Safeguard Defenders Director Peter Dahlin told The Daily Telegraph. “They are there to help say Chinese tourists who get into trouble, they can act as a liaison with the local police, they can help out, basically. The problem is they are not properly registered as [agents for the police] in these different countries.”
Dahlin said the centers have been operating “under the radar” while “targeting the Chinese diaspora.”
He added that the “operations eschew official bilateral police and judicial cooperation and violate the international rule of law, and may violate the territorial integrity of third countries involved in setting up a parallel policing mechanism using illegal methods.”
In one incident described in the report, officers at one office in Madrid found a man and forced him to participate in a “video call with public security agents and a prosecutor.” It also alleged some service stations have resorted to threatening to “cut electricity to the homes of families” or “restrict access to public schools for relatives” unless people did not do as they were told.
Blackmailing and browbeating Chinese nationals instead of going through formal extradition proceedings helps shield Beijing from “scrutiny of its human rights record,” the report claimed.
Reporting by The Washington Examiner.
