The general assembly of Interpol elected, Thursday, November 25, the Chinese Hu Binchen to the executive committee of the organization, its nerve center supposed to supervise the general secretariat. Hu Binchen, along with the Indian Praveen Sinha, landed one of two positions reserved for Asia among the thirteen on the executive committee, which were vacant. The candidate from China, general of the Ministry of Public Security, specialist in international cooperation, held the post of “police” adviser to the embassy of his country in Washington from 2011, according to his LinkedIn profile. He holds a Masters in Philosophy of Criminology from Cambridge.
Human rights defenders have alerted in vain to this candidate. This election risks giving “A green light for the government of the People’s Republic of China to continue its abuse of Interpol”, by the misappropriation of the criminal “red notices” which make it possible to arrest nationals everywhere in the world, thus estimate the members of the Interparliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). These elected officials questioned eighteen Western interior ministers on November 15, as revealed Release, because they fear to see “Tens of thousands of Hong Kongers, Uighurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese and Chinese dissidents living abroad placed in an even more risky situation”.
Two cases are frequently cited to illustrate this danger. Dolkun Isa, Uighur student leader in the 1980s, described as “Terrorist” by Beijing, was the subject of a “red notice” for nearly twenty years, deleted only in 2018 by Interpol. He was arrested in 2017 on his way to a hearing in the Italian Senate. Likewise, Idris Hasan, an Uighur activist, was arrested in July in Morocco at the request of China. Currently, 28 Chinese opponents abroad are targeted as well, under cover of “red notices”, according to the IPAC.
Beijing had obtained the presidency of Interpol in November 2016. It had placed Meng Hongwei, deputy minister of public security since 2004. A position he retained until 2018, although he transformed the presidency ( non-executive) of Interpol into a much more operational function. Mr. Meng, then, was assisted by Hu Binchen.
Chinese power “eats its own children”
But in September 2018, a dramatic turn of events. During a working visit to China, Meng Hongwei disappears, sending his wife Grace and her twins back in France the emoticon of a kitchen knife, apparently a symbol of the dangers that threatened him. His wife alerted the French authorities a few days later and applied for asylum in France. Having confessed, in 2019, to having embezzled more than 2 million dollars (1.8 million euros) between 2005 and 2017, Meng Hongwei will be sentenced to thirteen and a half years in prison in January 2020.
You have 39.84% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.