Germany is looking into whether China holds an illegal police station in Frankfurt, said a government spokesperson. This has come a week ahead of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ visit to China.
German state of Hesse’s interior ministry spokesperson informed that both the police and internal security services were investigating a report by Spanish activist group Safeguard Defenders. The group said that China had built unofficial police offices in 30 countries and Germany is one of them.
Referencing an old report in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, the spokesperson said the authorities had no hints at all that such facilities existed in Frankfurt. German took massive economical advantage from China’s unending demand for their machine tools. However, Russia’s Ukraine invasion forced countries to think about costs of long-term economic ties with authoritarian countries.
German Chacellor’s visit to China for which a delegation of large companies will also join, has been condemned by opposition who advised that Germany must draw conclusions from the fact that President Vladimir Putin couldn’t be deterred by engagement with West European country in the past.
The Dutch authorities also became active regarding Chinese offices in the Netherlands. They are suspected of carrying out official activities for example renewing driving licences. The Chinese embassy in The Hague denied the allegations. They also refused to accept allegations which claims that the embassy has troubled a Chinese dissident in the Netherlands.
Chinese police station shuts in Ireland
The Irish government closed a Chinese “police station” after pressure brew over them from a human rights group. Earlier this year the Fuzhou, a city in the Chinese Fujian province, Police Service Overseas Station opened in an office building on the Capel Street, which is now-pedestrianised. The building also contained other Chinese organisations. In their defence the Chinese authorities stated that the police station was meant to offer services to Chinese citizens in the country like renewal of driving licences.
However, according to a report released in September by the human rights organisation Safeguard Defenders, the stations convinced 230,000 immigrants to go back to China, where they sometimes faced criminal charges.
The Safeguard Defenders said in their report that Chinese operations world-wide “eschew official 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”. However, The Chinese embassy has rejected anything wrongly done in Dublin.
But the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs outrightly rejected claims that none of the Chinese authorities had asked for permission to build such “police station”. It also said that it has discussed the matter with the Chinese authorities and has also asked them “to close and cease operations” at the “police” station on Capel Street. The Chinese government claims that it has followed their request.
What’s in the Safeguard Defenders’ report?
A report by the Spanish-based NGO Safeguard Defenders, titled Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild, served as the catalyst for the research.
The organization claimed that 54 “overseas police service centers” had been built across five continents and 21 countries by the public security departments of two Chinese provinces. The majority of them are in Europe, with four in Italy and nine in Spain. It discovered two in London and one in Glasgow in the UK.
The groups were supposedly established to combat international crime and carry out administrative tasks, such renewing Chinese driver’s licences. However, according to Safeguard Defenders, in actuality they engage in “persuasion operations,” which have the goal of pressuring people who are thought to be speaking out against the Chinese government to go back home.
