Croatia has no information about the presence of illegal Chinese police stations on its territory, the police said in a statement on Sunday, reacting to a CNN report that explicitly mentioned Croatia.
Bejing has set up more than 100 overseas police stations across the globe to monitor its citizens, quoting a new report by human rights campaigners Safeguard Defenders, CNN said in a report published Sunday.
The report focused on the role that joint policing initiatives between China and several European nations – including Croatia, Serbia, and Romania – had allegedly played in the expansion of Chinese stations overseas.
“The police has information – based on its own insights or those provided by other agencies with which it cooperates – about the existence or activity of illegal police stations in Zagreb or Croatia,” the interior ministry said in the statement.
Police spokeswoman Jelena Bikić told state broadcaster HRT that Chinese police have been in Croatia, on the basis of a 2017 bilateral agreement, “for the sake of facilitating communication with tourists from China, and for a duration of one month”.
Six Chinese police officers came to Croatia during the summer of 2018 and eight in 2019, the interior ministry said. There were none during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 and 2021, and eight of them came this year., it added.
“We can describe the cooperation as positive and professional, ” Bikić added.
(Zoran Radosavljević | EURACTIV.com)
Source: euractiv.com
