China opens police station in Nigeria, and 20 other nations

In an effort to combat the rising criminal actions of its nationals overseas, the Chinese government has opened police stations in Nigeria as well as more than 20 other nations in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

This information was provided in a statement of inquiry titled "110 Overseas Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild."

The police stations, according to widely circulated information, were established to "crack down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activity involving abroad Chinese."

Apart from Nigeria, the other two African nations with Chinese police stations are Lesotho and Tanzania.

The report by Safeguard Defender revealed, “Rather than cooperating with local authorities in the 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 organisations in the illegal methods employed to pursue ‘fugitives’.”

In addition, it stated that Chinese officials claimed that from April 2021 to July 2022, 230,000 nationals had been "persuaded to return" to face criminal procedures in China as part of a large national drive to combat fraud and telecommunication fraud by Chinese individuals residing abroad.

In a full-fledged "guilt by association" campaign, China's official pronouncements clarified the use of denying suspects' children the right to an education at home as well as other actions against relatives and family members.

According to the rights organisation, China identified nine nations as having severe cases of fraud, telecom fraud, and web crimes, and Chinese nationals are no longer permitted to enter those nations without "good cause."

“While establishing these operations to hunt down those accused of fraud and telecommunications fraud, China identified nine countries particularly prone to hosting Chinese nationals engaging in such criminal activities, the ‘nine forbidden countries’,” the Safeguard explained.

The establishment of overseas police "service stations" was a global phenomenon, however, most of them were in democratic, western countries, with a special emphasis on Europe, rather than in the "nine banned countries."

The group also stated that using "threats and intimidation to target suspects abroad, as well as foregoing any "pretext of due process or the consideration of suspects' innocence until proven guilty, targeting suspects' children and relatives in China as "guilty by association" or "collateral damage," is now becoming an endemic problem."

“Whether the targets are dissidents, corrupt officials or low-level criminals, the problem remains the same: The use of irregular methods — often combining carrots with sticks — against the targeted individual or their family members in China undermines any due process and the most basic rights of suspects,” Safeguard Defender further stated.

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