Craven international bodies are helping China to crush freedom

Have we lost the plot? Interpol, the international policing agency, has just elected a new Chinese official to its executive committee after the last guy, an official named Meng Hongwei, was literally disappeared by the Chinese state. There is no symbol that better represents the state of the world’s governance organisations.

Interpol helps its 195 member countries to share policing information and issues cross-border arrest warrants for individuals they want to nab. One of its four founding principles is “respect for human rights”. But authoritarian regimes have found that it’s an excellent vehicle for hunting down dissident and ethnic minority targets who have slipped through their fingers.

In recent years, China has stepped up its use of Interpol to pursue democracy activists, government critics and prominent members of ethnic groups it wants to exterminate. Xi Jinping has launched two campaigns, “Fox Hunt” and “Sky Net”, whose aims are to sweep up and extradite critics of his regime abroad. Research by the human rights group Safeguard Defenders shows that Chinese state media have boasted that Interpol tools are being used in nearly 3,000 cases as part of these campaigns.

The farcical case of Meng and his replacement shows how easy we make it for Beijing. In 2018, Meng, the chief of Interpol, took a trip back to China – and never returned. Yet here we are three years later and Beijing has a new official on Interpol’s executive committee. Have you disappeared your own official? Never mind! Send another one!

Democratic countries provide more than 60 per cent of the funding for Interpol, yet as usual we have rendered ourselves procedurally impotent, having diffused voting power among the organisation’s many member states.

Still, there are levers we could pull. Dozens of parliamentarians in the International Parliamentary Alliance on China wrote a letter in opposition to China’s plans to get its official on to Interpol’s committee. Where was the campaign at government level? And what are Interpol’s biggest funders doing to ensure that its practices follow its legal commitment to political neutrality and human rights? Interpol recently introduced a code of conduct and began reforms that it says will “ensure greater transparency”. Its critics are sceptical.

Recently, Meng’s wife, Grace, who lives in France with their children, spoke publicly for the first time about how she fears the long arm of Beijing.

This power is being amplified by bodies like Interpol. And through them, democracies, rather than hindering this activity, are aiding and abetting it.

The world recently had a taste of how the Chinese “disappearing” system works. Peng Shuai is not a typical government critic. She is a tennis player with a network and fan base across the globe. Still, when she spoke out about being sexually abused by a senior retired Communist Party official called Zhang Gaoli, she was quickly and effectively silenced.

First, the regime deleted her blog post. Then she disappeared from view for days. Then she reappeared smiling, attending official events, going to dinner with “friends” (including several unsmiling, official-looking men) and even held a half-hour phone call with Olympic bureaucrats, who afterwards declared her to be “fine”.

Had Peng known about the hell raised abroad by her friends and foreign governments, she might have concluded that her best chance of escaping China and the lifetime of surveillance, gagging and control now awaiting her would be to stick to her guns. But she was presumably kept in the dark. Pressure must have been applied to secure her co-operation. The usual method would be to take family members hostage. Thus, with the help of the Olympic apparatus Beijing neutralised a PR nightmare.

Last week, I commented that China and other authoritarian regimes keep making mistakes. This week, craven international organisations, established and supported by the West, bailed China out of its own mess. With “friends” like these…

The chief of Interpol took a trip back to China – and never returned