Interpol Tragicomedy

Wife of Disappeared Former Interpol President Lawyers Up in Europe
By Ng Yik-tung and Sing Man

Grace Meng, wife of missing Interpol president Meng Hongwei, consults her mobile phone in a hotel lobby in Lyon, France, Oct. 7, 2018.

The wife of former Interpol president Meng Hongwei has hired two European law firms in a bid to track down her husband, who was detained last month on suspicion of bribery during a trip home to China.
In an e-mail statement to Reuters, Grace Meng said she had received offers of help from all over the world since her husband's sudden disappearance and his subsequent resignation from Interpol, which the international police body accepted without publicly questioning or explaining the sudden move.
Grace Meng said she has hired the French law firm of Marsigny Avocats and the London-based Lindeborg Counsellors, who specialize in international cases, to help find her husband, who is being detained in an unknown location.
“Above all, I urge everyone to raise their voice in asking China to respect our family’s fundamental human rights,” she said. 

“His disappearance could not be for anything other than political reasons.”
The Lindeborg website describes its team of lawyers as including a former Interpol General Counsel and Legal Affairs Director, and offers experienced legal counsel to those wishing to challenge "red notices," or international arrest warrants issued by the Lyon-based organization.
Paris-based Marsigny specialize in cases involving national or international corruption, misconduct, misappropriation of public funds, money laundering, and tax evasion, and advises clients on international asset seizures and extradition procedures.
Germany-based law scholar Qian Yuejun, who edits the China-Europe Herald newspaper, said Meng's detention is "undoubtedly political," and that the law firms could take steps to track him in China, as well as lobbying for diplomatic pressure to be brought to bear on the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
"Meng Hongwei is a Chinese national, but his place of residence is France, so the law firm can ask the French government to ask the Chinese government about him," said Qian, who last year led a demonstration outside Interpol's German headquarters protesting against Meng's presidency.
"Another angle is Interpol. This case is already a combination of politics and law, and these lawyers will be aware of political channels they could use," he said.

Red Notices
Critics of Meng's presidency said China would use its influence with Interpol to successfully issue "red notices" targeting peaceful critics of the regime and political opponents of Xi Jinping under the banner of the anti-corruption campaign or other criminal allegations.
Qian said Meng's disappearance is yet another example of extrajudicial detentions and punishments meted out by Beijing to its targets.
"If the Chinese government is a rogue state, then it must be clearly described as such," he said. 

"Meng Hongwei was illegally kidnapped, a tragic side-effect of power struggles [in Beijing]."
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told journalists that Grace Meng could call her husband "at any time," but had declined to do so. 

However, such calls are likely to be closely monitored, and it is unclear whether Meng has had access to a lawyer.

Outlook not good
Beijing-based rights lawyer Lin Qilei said international law enforcement has collided with an authoritarian regime, and that the outlook isn't good for Meng.
"Meng Hongwei's wife may have hired foreign lawyers and be drumming up international support, even to the highest levels of government and diplomacy," Lin said. 

"But she should also try to find him a lawyer in China."
Lin said such an effort would highlight the Chinese government's control over who is allowed to represent former high-ranking officials in such cases.
U.S.-based veteran rights campaigner Liu Qing said the Chinese government has used "mafia tactics" to detain Meng.
"They have just made the head of an international law enforcement body disappear into thin air, by trapping and secretly imprisoning him," Liu said. 

"This shows ... the Chinese Communist Party's contempt for global public opinion."
"The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of international kidnaps," he wrote in a commentary aired on RFA's Mandarin Service, citing the 2015 cross-border detentions of five Hong Kong booksellers wanted by Beijing for selling banned political books to customers in mainland China and the reported abduction of "missing" billionaire Xiao Jianhua from a Hong Kong hotel in April 2017.
"If we do not recognize and cut off the long and pernicious arm of the Chinese Communist Party as it reaches across the world, international due process and rule of law could be ruined beyond all recognition," Liu said.

The Chinese Can Not Be Trusted to Lead Global Institutions

The abduction of Interpol’s president shows that Beijing’s officials will be subordinate to the orders of the Communist Party.

By BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN

Meng Hongwei

China has spent years trying to gain an equal footing in international institutions originally set up by the West. 

Those efforts have seen gradual success, as Chinese nationals have come to occupy leading positions on United Nations committees, multilateral development banks, international courts, and many other organizations.
So when Meng Hongwei, a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party member who was chosen to serve as the president of Interpol in 2016, disappeared last month while visiting China, and was revealed two weeks later to have been detained by Chinese authorities, it seemed like an unforced error. 

Interpol is an important international organization tasked with facilitating cooperation between police forces in countries around the world. 

But even so, party disciplinary authorities were treating Meng first and foremost as a party member who had strayed from the straight and narrow, rather than as the internationally recognized top official of a major multilateral organization who deserves due process.
Meng’s detention shows that under Beijing’s increasingly confident global authoritarianism, China’s participation in and even its leadership of international institutions will be openly subordinate to the diktat of the Communist Party. 

This stands in stark contrast to the preceding eras under previous Presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, when China paid lip service to following international law and to becoming a conforming member of the current international system.
The circumstances under which Meng disappeared highlight the authority the party still wields over Meng, even while he served as the head of a supposedly politically neutral institution. 

His disappearance first became known when his wife reported his absence to police in France, where the couple lives, and the French police launched an investigation. 

His wife had begun to worry for his safety when she received a knife emoji in a text message from her husband, taking it as a coded warning that all was not well on his trip home.
On October 7, almost two weeks after Meng went missing, Chinese authorities announced that they were charging Meng with bribery. 

After coming to power in 2012, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping launched a sweeping anti-corruption crackdown that has felled thousands of mid-level party cadres and numerous high-ranking officials.
But experts say the anti-corruption campaign is used as cover for political purges intended to strengthen Xi’s grip on power. 

There are hints of a political element in Meng’s detention; when announcing the charges against Meng, Chinese authorities also stressed the need for “absolute loyal political character.” 

Meng is now being held in a custody system notorious for torture, abuse, and denial of access to lawyers or a fair trial. 

It is certainly normal for any country to prosecute government officials for corruption; it is not normal to detain them without notice or charge, then thrust them into a system without fair representation or transparency.
That raises serious questions about the fitness of any member of the Chinese Communist Party to serve in a leadership position in international organizations. 

Meng’s detention is a clear sign that any party members abroad, no matter how high their profile or how important political neutrality is to their position, are still subject to the will and demands of the party—a party that’s willing to punish them at any cost if they stray. 

This is far truer under Xi than under his recent predecessors because one of Xi’s top goals has been to revitalize the once-moribund party, reestablish it as the main guiding force in China, and double down on party discipline.
It’s clear that Meng was the party’s man at Interpol. 

During his tenure as Interpol president, Meng simultaneously served as a vice minister in China’s public-security bureau, the country’s chief law-enforcement institution. 

It’s unlikely he could have risen to such a high position without demonstrating years of loyalty to the party. 

And the public-security bureau is behind illegal detentions and numerous other injustices visited upon a populace with few civil-rights protections. 

That means Meng spent his career climbing the ladder within a ruthless organization.
Thus, Meng’s election in 2017 to the position of Interpol president, though a largely ceremonial post, raised concerns that China would use Meng’s position to pursue political dissidents through the issuance of Interpol red notices. 

A red notice is roughly equivalent to an international arrest warrant requested by an individual government, and Interpol approves requests based not on an assessment of the target’s guilt but rather on whether the requesting government followed the appropriate laws and regulations in making the request. 

This makes the red-notice system notoriously easy to abuse; Russia, China, Turkey, Venezuela, and some Central Asian nations are known to request politically motivated red notices targeting political foes and journalists. 

Interpol member nations are not required to detain or extradite those with a red notice against them, though many do.
And indeed, shortly after Meng became president, Interpol issued a red notice for Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire who had recently threatened to release compromising information on leading members of the Communist Party.
But not everything went so smoothly for China, or for Meng. 

In February, Interpol rescinded a red notice, originally issued at China’s request, for Dolkun Isa, the Europe-based president of World Uyghur Congress, a group that advocates for a beleaguered Chinese ethnic minority. 

Beijing claims that Isa is a terrorist, and China has frequently requested that European governments arrest and deport him.
Some observers noted that about six weeks after Isa’s red notice was revoked, Meng was removed from his post as a member of the public-security bureau’s party committee, the party organ embedded inside the bureau to provide leadership and ideological guidance, leading to speculation that the party was unhappy with Meng for allowing Interpol to remove the notice.
“Look at East Turkestan,” wrote Bill Bishop, the author of the influential Sinocism newsletter, referring to the Chinese region where an estimated 1 million Muslims are being held without due process. 

“Does Beijing care if there is fleeting concern over the fate of their Interpol appointee?”
These days, Beijing seems far less concerned about the opinion of the liberal West than it once was. Rather than continuing to try to hide the existence of its concentration camps in East Turkestan, Chinese officials are declaring them to be a true societal good. 

In the contested South China Sea, China now rarely claims that it aims to uphold international law—instead, it emphasizes that no one has the right to criticize its island building and militarization there. 

Might makes right, as it were.
At the same time, Beijing wields greater sway over international institutions than ever before. 

That means stakeholders in the international system would do well to ask themselves what price they might pay if they offer leadership positions to Chinese Communist Party members. 

It’s likely that as China promotes its authoritarian system around the world, one will increasingly see the party justify and even tout its realpolitik approach to international power. 

A liberal world order built on human rights and rule of law will need to find an effective response—and soon.