Romania’s Interior Ministry responded Monday to information provided by CNN, which cited a report that Beijing has set up more than 100 so-called police stations abroad, around the world, including in Romania, for monitoring, prosecution and sometimes repatriation. Chinese citizens in exile, using bilateral security agreements with countries in Europe and Africa to gain a significant international presence.

• “At the level of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there is no signed agreement with the authorities of the People’s Republic of China that would allow the creation of such entities.
• All existing bilateral cooperation documents in the field of MAI competence, regardless of the state with which they were signed, comply with domestic Romanian and international legislation.
• We assure you that the Ministry of Internal Affairs, through specialized structures, constantly carries out measures in accordance with its competence to ensure that actions that harm national security, public order and citizens’ rights are not carried out on the territory of Romania. citizens”, the Ministry of Affairs sent an internal request to HotNews.ro.

China reportedly has over 100 police stations around the world

The Madrid-based rights group Safeguard Defenders says it has found evidence that Beijing operates a further 48 police stations abroad, after the NGO first revealed the existence of 54 more in September, CNN reported.

Her new report, Patrol and Convince, focuses on the scale of the network and examines the role of joint police initiatives that China has established with several European countries, including Italy, Croatia, Serbia and Romania, as a test program to expand China’s overseas departments are larger than was known before publication of information about the organization.

The NGO now claims, among other things, that the Chinese national was forced to repatriate by agents working undercover at a Chinese police station in a Paris suburb, having been recruited specifically for the purpose. Earlier, he reported that two other Chinese exiles were forcibly repatriated from Europe – one from Serbia, the other from Spain.

Who will manage the police stations?

Safeguard Defenders, which reviewed publicly available Chinese official documents for evidence of human rights abuses, said it had identified four different police jurisdictions under China’s Ministry of Public Security operating in at least 53 countries around the world, in theory to help Chinese expatriates from those jurisdictions. with their problems abroad.

Beijing denies the activities of undeclared police forces outside its territory, and China’s foreign ministry told CNN in November: “We hope that interested parties will stop inciting tension. It is unacceptable to use this as an excuse to denigrate China.”

China says these organizations are administrative centers set up to help Chinese expatriates with things like changing their driver’s licenses. China also said that these offices also emerged as a result of the pandemic, which has left many Chinese quarantined in other countries, traveling outside China and unable to update their documents.

Asked by CNN last month about the initial Safeguard Defenders allegations, China’s foreign ministry said the overseas units were staffed by volunteers. But a new report by the organization claims that one police network it investigated had 135 people working in its first 21 precincts.

The organization also concluded a three-year employment contract for an employee of the Chinese ward in Stockholm.

Unannounced consular activity outside of a country’s official diplomatic missions is highly unusual and illegal unless the host country has given its express consent. In addition, the Safeguard Defenders report states that some wards were established several years before the pandemic.

The information has so far led to investigations in at least 13 countries and fueled growing diplomatic tensions between China and countries such as Canada, which has a large Chinese diaspora.

China is not the only superpower to be accused of using extrajudicial methods to achieve policing or political persecution of citizens abroad. Russia, for example, has twice been accused of using deadly chemical and radioactive agents on British soil to try to kill its former spies – allegations Russia has always denied.