In recent days, the election in Indonesia as INTERPOL president of sixty-year-old Meng Hongwei, Chinese Deputy Minister of Public Security, has caused concern. The agency based in Lyon, France, would coordinate the criminal police forces of the world, whose agents can only issue international "warnings" on wanted persons, favoring their arrest.
The appointment would have sparked several controversies, as international public opinion has hypothesized that the mandate could be used to further exploit Beijing's internal repression system, aimed at prosecuting the regime's dissidents who fled to the rest of the world.
Chinese police hold a grim record on human rights, including the endemic practice of forcing "confessions" and the widespread use of torture; some foreign sources remind us that, unlike most law enforcement agencies around the world, the Chinese police are closely linked to a single party system that effectively protects a dictatorial system.
Already deputy director of People's Army Police (the paramilitary force often engaged in the most unstable areas of the country, including Tibet, on the border with North Korea and the westernmost province of Xinjiang), Meng Hongwei will aim to deepen the fight against transnational crime and fight the corruption.
A man loyal to the party and its ideology, in recent years he has already witnessed the INTERPOL-China collaboration program, which aimed to bring back to the country the 100 dissident officials in the government of Beijing who fled abroad, most of them between states United States and Canada.
However, the latter countries did not cooperate or adhere to the extradition requests, precisely because they were afraid of returning the fugitives to harsh treatment by China, such as the use of the death penalty even in the absence of concrete evidence.
Meng Hongwei's term of office will end in 2018. His name joins that of other Chinese officials who have received prominent appointments in world organizations in the past, including economist Zhu Min, deputy director general of the International Monetary Fund from 2011 to 2016 and Margaret Chan, former director general of the World Health Organization.
(photo: 中国 人民 武装警察 部队)
