The NGO Safeguard Defenders denounces the “weak” response from Italy, the country with the highest number of these peculiar police centers
With nearly 300,000 members, Italy has one of the largest Chinese immigrant communities in Europe. In order to control this diaspora, since 2016 the authorities of the Asian giant have opened 11 clandestine police stations on Italian territory, offices that do not have the permission of the government of Rome and are used to track down dissidents or criminals and with threats to put under pressure. to their relatives or other methods so that they return to their country of origin for processing.
Italy is the country in the world with the largest number of these “police stations”, according to the latest report by the Spanish NGO Safeguard Defenders, which denounced that of the hundred of these centers present in more than 50 countries, they are forced to return to China at least 83 people, one of them from Madrid. In Spain, there are nine of these peculiar police stations, which Beijing says defended only serve to help their compatriots with bureaucratic procedures.
“It is good news that the Spanish authorities have opened an investigation into this matter,” said Laura Harth, campaign manager of Safeguard Defenders, who believes that the reaction of the government of our country to this action by China, which constitutes a violation of national sovereignty and international law, is “halfway” between Canada’s more angry response and France’s and Italy’s “feeble” response. The latter country has always managed to maintain a peculiar balance in its relations with China against the tougher position of its Western partners. It proved this in 2019 when it became the first G-7 state to join the New Silk Road, the flagship project of the Asian giant’s president, Xi Jinping, to strengthen trade ties between Asia and Europe. Four years earlier, Rome and Beijing had signed an agreement allowing joint patrols of police officers from both countries on Italian territory.
It is surprising that some European countries are so reluctant to respond to this phenomenon. If all European countries tackled it together, they would have the strength to respond to China, which would find it very difficult to use its usual economic blackmail if the European Union reacted en bloc,” Harth insisted at a press conference. in Rome. “It is time to act together so that each country is not afraid to go alone and bear the negative consequences.” This NGO has obtained all the information of its latest reports from the web pages of the Chinese institutions themselves or of their official media, where authorities pride themselves on their ability to repatriate suspected criminals, including political dissidents.
Said media reported that between April 2021 and last August, 230,000 Chinese migrants abroad were “persuaded” to return to their homeland to face prosecution for alleged participation in telematics fraud. Another 11,000 people are said to have been forced to return from abroad as part of the “Fox Hunt” operation, unleashed by Xi to fight corruption, but which also allegedly served to purge the ranks of the Communist Party. It is suspected that these peculiar ‘police stations’ played a role in these forced repatriations without the permission of the local authorities.
Italy’s Interior Minister Giulio Piantedosi had to give an explanation in the Chamber of Deputies on December 7 after the information revealed by Safeguard Defenders. Piantedosi assured that he was aware of only two of the eleven centers that the NGO says are active in the country and, while accepting Beijing’s version that they only engage in bureaucratic practices, he clarified that the police and secret services have opened an investigation to clarify what their job really is.
Source: La Verdad
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