[ad_1]
While Beijing operates more than 100 overseas police stations around the world, some of which are allegedly used for cross-border crackdowns, other authoritarian regimes have called such efforts ” “copy”, a member of the House Canada-China Committee said on March 20.
Expert witness Laura Harth, campaign director for human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders, was asked at a committee meeting by Liberal MP Peter Fragiskatos whether China was the only country to have set up secret police service centers abroad. . In response, she said other dictatorships have not yet done so, but that they are beginning to learn from China’s experience.
“Cross-border repression is certainly used by all authoritarian regimes and is growing in scope. And smaller authoritarian countries are starting to learn from these efforts and imitations,” she said at a committee meeting. said.
“The scale of the Chinese Communist Party’s manipulation of these [overseas police service centres] It is incomparable. ”
In two reports published in September and December In 2022, Safeguard Defenders identified a total of 102 unofficial Chinese police service centers operating in 53 countries based on open source online information from Chinese authorities or state media. Among them, 5 of these stations have addresses in Canada, 3 in the Greater Toronto area, and 2 in the Metro Vancouver area.
The RCMP previously announced that four of these police stations (three in the GTA and one in Vancouver) had ceased operations. The Epoch Times previously inquired about whether the RCMP was considering his fifth location in B.C., but received no response.
The RCMP recently released an investigation into two other Chinese police stations in the Brossard and Montreal districts of Quebec, saying it received at least 15 serious pieces of information about those two locations.
Safeguard Defenders previously said that following the report, it had launched an investigation into a Chinese police station that allegedly had jurisdiction over 14 countries.
“There are several other countries that have announced investigations, but not all of them have been very open about the extent of their investigations,” Haas told lawmakers.
Haas said Beijing’s interference in Canada has long been documented, but warnings from dissidents and rights groups have not been addressed by the authorities, citing an increasingly “brazen violation of national sovereignty” by Beijing. He pointed out that they are connected.
“I think Canada, like other democracies in the world, has closed its eyes to everything that’s going on for too long. Perhaps it hoped it would go away if we didn’t see it.” I guess,” she said. “It’s clearly enabled the expansion of these businesses, putting us at risk today.”
But she said the reaction of police and the public to the news of the China Police Department in Canada was “one of the best we’ve seen in the world.”
“It’s tough. It’s going to be hard to get over. But this is important. [interference] Awareness is the first step to actually dealing with a problem, so society can appreciate everything that is happening.
[ad_2]