The NGO Safeguard Defenders denounces the “weak” response from Italy, the country with the largest number of these peculiar police centers
With nearly 300,000 members, Italy has one of the largest Chinese immigrant communities in Europe. To control this diaspora, the authorities of the Asian giant have opened 11 clandestine police stations on Italian territory since 2016, offices that do not have the authorization of the Government of Rome and that are used to locate dissidents or criminals and pressure them with threats. to their relatives or other methods so that they return to their country of origin to be processed.
Italy is the nation 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 from the hundred of these centers present in more than 50 countries, they have been forced to return to China. at least 83 people, one of them from Madrid. In Spain there would be nine of these peculiar Police stations, which, according to Beijing has been 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,” declared Laura Harth, campaign director for Safeguard Defenders, who considers that the response of the Government of our country to this action by China, which constitutes a violation of national sovereignty and international law, is “halfway” between the more angry reaction of Canada and the “weak” response of France and Italy. The latter country has always maintained a peculiar balance in its relations with China with respect to the tougher position of its Western partners. It demonstrated 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 boost trade relations between Asia and Europe. Four years earlier, Rome and Beijing had signed an agreement that allowed joint patrols of police officers from both countries on Italian territory.
economic blackmail
‘It is surprising that some European nations are so reluctant to respond to this phenomenon. If all European countries faced 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 responded en bloc,” Harth insisted at a press conference held in Rome. “It is time to act together so that each country is not afraid to go alone and suffer the negative consequences.” This NGO has obtained all the information revealed in its latest reports from the web pages of the Chinese institutions themselves or from their official media, where the authorities take pride in their ability to repatriate alleged 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 home nation to face prosecution for allegedly participating in telematic fraud. Another 11,000 people would have been forced to return from abroad as part of the ‘Fox Hunt’ operation, unleashed by Xi to fight corruption, but which would also have served to purge the ranks of the Communist Party. The suspicion is that these peculiar ‘police stations’ have played a role in these forced repatriations carried out without permission from the local authorities.
The Italian Minister of the Interior, Giulio Piantedosi, had to give explanations on December 7 in the Chamber of Deputies after the information revealed by Safeguard Defenders. Piantedosi assured that he was only aware of two of the eleven centers that the NGO affirms that operate in the country and although he accepted Beijing’s version that they are only engaged in bureaucratic practices, he clarified that the Police and the secret services have opened a research to clarify what their job really is.
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