China’s former Vice Minister of Public Security will be the next INTERPOL president

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has reacted to today’s election of Meng Hongwei, the former Vice Minister of Public Security in China, as INTERPOL President. “We fear that the new president might use INTERPOL to persecute Chinese regime critics,” explained Ulrich Delius, the STP’s China-expert, in Göttingen on Thursday. “Further, he could use his office to stoke the power struggle within the Communist Party – under the pretext of trying to fight corruption – and to eliminate unpopular opponents.” During a meeting of the International Police Organization in Bali, Indonesia, Meng Hongwei was elected as the new President of INTERPOL, for an office term of four years. From 2004 to 2013, he had been Vice Minister of Public Security in China. 

China’s state security has already used INTERPOL to silence Chinese human rights activists abroad. In 2003, the Uyghur human rights activist Dolkun Isa, who lives in Germany, had received a “INTERPOL red notice”. In consequence, the Secretary General of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress was briefly arrested when he visited South Korea in 2009, despite having a German passport. He was subsequently deported to Germany. In 2016, he was denied entry into India.

“China’s state security is trying to restrict the freedom of movement of critical human rights activists by means of these ‘red notices’,” said Delius. They are not the same as an international arrest warrant, but serve to inform other states that a member state of INTERPOL has issued a warrant for arrest against the person concerned. However, INTERPOL does not check the allegations. Therefore, persecution states can easily use this means to intimidate or even silence critical voices of the civil society.

China alone had about 100 “red notices” issued in 2015 – mostly against formerly high-ranking Chinese officials who were publicly accused of corruption. “There are, however, legal concerns about whether the accused will receive a fair trial in China, and whether the investigations are not primarily to be seen as politically motivated initiatives in the power struggle among China’s leading party representatives, in favor of chairman Xi Jinping,” explained Delius. “China is not to be seen as a state of law, and there is no independent judiciary. As long as there is torture in Chinese police stations, and as long as civil rights activists and critical lawyers are declared to be offenders under some pretext, INTERPOL should not be chaired by a leading politician from the People’s Republic.”

Header Photo: Mark Garten via UN Photo