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Called a “reception agreement”, the agreement has a duration of 5 years, was signed in 2015 and recently expired on July 7. This agreement allows Chinese agents to come to Switzerland to question Chinese citizens who are in the category of deportation by Swiss officials.
Unlike the more than 50 agreements that Switzerland has signed with other countries, the agreement with China was never made public by the Swiss government, until last August.
Human rights group Safeguard Defenders recently obtained an official English translation of the Sino-Swiss agreement and has revealed confidential terms that may cause public concern.
Extremely secret
According to the sheet The Guardian“Experts” from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS) will be invited to Switzerland to be “on duty” for two weeks. After accepting the invitation, China can choose and send agents to Switzerland without having to wait for approval from the host government, that is, without going through the usual visa procedures.
These agents can enter Switzerland without official status and Switzerland agrees to remain anonymous. The reports they provide to the Swiss authorities are also kept confidential.
The re-acceptance agreement is common in international law. However, according to the Safeguard Defenders group, the 2015 agreement between China and Switzerland is “completely different” from the documents that Bern signed with other countries.
According to The Guardian, there are many unusual things in the aforementioned agreement, not only the secrecy of the agreement but also the work of the Chinese agents, the presence of the Beijing agents in Switzerland. and also the selection of MPS, considered a security super suite formed not only by the police but also by an intelligence agent.
“Only in a few cases do the parties sign a buy-back agreement that will allow representatives to travel to a partner country to bring someone home. In those cases, the representative sent must have a limited scope of activity and must perform their functions openly, ”according to the Safeguard Defenders team.
Law professor Margaret Lewis from Seton Hall in the United States commented that the previous agreement is too beneficial for the Chinese side and goes beyond conventional information exchange agreements on illegal migration. “It seems strange to me that the fact that someone is staying illegally in Switzerland bothers China so much that it has to send an official,” he said.
Not only other countries, Switzerland itself did not know about this agreement until last August. According to the sheet The Guardian, Information about the deal was revealed by a local news site amid international concerns about China targeting opposition figures and dissidents.
The agreement was so confidential that neither the Swiss Parliament nor the Foreign Affairs Committee were aware of it. The Foreign Relations Committee recently voted to supplement the consultation procedures before the government extended the agreement.
The Swiss Migration Secretariat (SEM) defends this agreement and considers it a necessary measure to tackle illegal migration. SEM claims to continue to monitor the disclosure of information to Chinese officials, saying the agreement was actually used only once in 2016, when four people applied for asylum in Switzerland and five of the 13 were deported. to export.
Many worries
Meanwhile, pressure groups believe that with the agreement, Switzerland risks violating the principles of “no return” to protect refugees who risk being threatened if they return. These groups fear that there is no follow-up mechanism in place to ensure the safety of refugees returning to China.
According to some activists, the aforementioned agreement could make Switzerland uncomfortable when it comes to dealing with Hong Kong.
According to the The Guardian, In recent years, China has increasingly actively used bilateral and multilateral forms (such as Interpol) and has informally gone to other countries to search for citizens who are abroad.
“What the Chinese agents did in two weeks was completely neglected. In theory, such a permit is very interesting. If this is kept secret, the governments of other countries will not know.
This became even more alarming, said Professor Lewis, when Switzerland allowed MPS officials to come to their countries with very little supervision. “Normally, governments want to strictly control foreign agents operating in their territories,” he warned. If Switzerland continues to favor the Chinese agent, I am afraid that this non-public interrogation of Chinese citizens will drift in a negative direction.
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