(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) While Canadian prime minister and aspiring tyrant Justin Trudeau was busy persecuting pro-freedom truckers during the pandemic, the Chinese communist government established de facto state police headquarters in the city of Toronto, where intelligence agents are charged with dispensing what critics have called “extrajudicial” means of tracking and targeting Chinese nationals living abroad.
At least three addresses in Toronto were revealed by the European human rights group Safeguard Defenders to be registered as “service stations” operated by China’s Fuzhou Public Security Bureau, reported the National Post.
Canada isn’t alone in “hosting” the outposts, which number upwards of 54 stations, including one in New York City, in 30 countries, covering five continents.
While the Chinese government claims the stations are mainly used to “combat the growing issue of fraud and telecommunication fraud by Chinese nationals living abroad,” and to serve as embassy-like outposts for hospitality and tourism, the Safeguard Defenders report revealed far more nefarious purposes.
The cop shops’ primary charge is to carryout China’s policy of “Involuntary Return,” compelling Chinese nationals to return home whenever the communist regime deems that they’ve violated Chinese law.
“These operations eschew official bilateral police and judicial cooperation,” the Safeguard report informed. Chinese official statements claimed some 230,000 alleged “fugitives” had been “persuaded to return” from varying countries between April 2021 and July 2022.
Local media is now step-by-step investigating many of these stations, with SD’s help, and we have collected lots of data on many of them, to push understanding about these stations further.
Much more to come on this topic. https://t.co/NEguhacBOf pic.twitter.com/fIKg06IGo0
— Safeguard Defenders (保护卫士) (@SafeguardDefend) September 23, 2022
Chinese state police working the “service stations,” are instructed to use a variety of “persuasion” measures “in addition to the long-standing tradition of threatening harassment, detention or even imprisonment of family members back in China for targets that refuse to comply,” the report stated.
“One such method, outlined in official documentation, is to deny children of the suspect still in China the right to education,” the report revealed.
“This is an outrage,” Charles Burton, a former diplomat who served at Canada’s embassy in Beijing, wrote in the Globe and Mail.
“Chinese police setting up offices in Canada, then ‘persuading’ alleged criminals to return to the motherland to face ‘justice’ – while our own government and security services apparently choose to look the other way – represents a gross violation of Canada’s national sovereignty, international law and the norms of diplomacy,” Burton wrote.
The Safeguard Defenders report drew the same conclusion:
Abandoning 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.
These methods allow the CCP and their security organs to circumvent normal bilateral mechanisms of police and judicial cooperation, thereby severely undermining the international rule of law and territorial integrity of the third countries involved.
