Italy will no longer allow Chinese police officers to participate in joint patrols with Italian officials. The decision, announced by the Italian interior minister in an interview published on Monday, follows an allegation that China would maintain illegal police stations in 54 countries, used to monitor, arrest and deport Chinese expatriates and political dissidents. regime.
The allegation is from the human rights organization Safeguard Defenders, based in Spain. An entity report released a month ago states that Chinese police opened 102 of these “overseas service centers” around the globe and would have convinced 230,000 Chinese to return to the Asian country between April 2021 and July of this year.
Italy would be home to 11 of these establishments. According to Safeguard Defenders, in the European country, the “service centers” would be linked precisely to a bilateral agreement from 2015 that allowed Chinese police officers to integrate patrols along with their Italian counterparts in Rome, Milan, Naples and other locations.
The Italian Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, had denied that the pact had anything to do with these alleged installations in a speech to Parliament earlier this month. Now, he assured the newspaper Il Foglio that such “forms of cooperation will not occur again, nor will they be replicated in other settings”, adding that the patrols took place between 2016 and 2019 but had been suspended due to Covid.
Chinese authorities deny Safeguard Defenders’ accusations, and claim that the units were run by volunteers and were intended to help expatriates renew documents and other bureaucracies made difficult by the pandemic. The Chinese embassy in Rome did not respond to the report’s requests for clarification.
A number of countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands have launched investigations based on the reports. If confirmed, the allegations would violate international law and put Beijing at the center of a global diplomatic firestorm.
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