China Opens A Police Station In Nigeria 

The other two African nations with Chinese police stations are Lesotho and Tanzania.

By Omotayo Olutekunbi

In an effort to combat the rising criminal activities of its citizens abroad, the Chinese government has opened police stations in Nigeria as well as more than 20 other countries 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 “crackdown on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas 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 organizations in the illegal methods employed to pursue ‘fugitives’.”

In addition, it stated that Chinese authorities claimed that from April 2021 to July 2022, 230,000 nationals had been “persuaded to return” to face criminal proceedings in China as part of a massive national campaign to combat fraud and telecommunication fraud by Chinese citizens living abroad.

In a full-fledged “guilt by association” campaign, China’s official statements clarified the use of depriving suspects’ children of the right to an education at home as well as other actions against relatives and family members.

According to the rights organization, China identified nine nations as having serious cases of fraud, telecom fraud, and web crimes, and Chinese nationals are no longer permitted to enter those nations without “good reason.”

The establishment of overseas police “service stations” was a global phenomenon, though most of them were in democratic, western countries, with a particular emphasis on Europe, rather than in the “nine forbidden countries.”

The group also noted that forsaking 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, and using threats and intimidation to target suspects abroad, is now itself 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.