China to Prosecute Taiwanese in Fraud Case Despite Acquittals in Kenya
|
Version 0 of 1. The Chinese government announced on Wednesday that a group of Taiwanese citizens who were deported to China from Kenya would be prosecuted on charges of telecommunications fraud despite having been acquitted of the same charges by a Kenyan court this month. The move escalated a diplomatic battle that has outraged Taiwan, which sees the deportation of its citizens to China as an extrajudicial abduction. The case has also raised international legal questions and involved Kenya in the geopolitical maneuvering between China and Taiwan. The Taiwanese citizens arrived in Beijing on Wednesday, hooded and handcuffed, after being forced onto a plane by Kenyan police officers. Taiwanese legislators accused the Kenyan government of violating international law and its own laws to placate China. They noted that the citizens had been cleared of charges of involvement in a large telecommunications fraud ring based in Kenya. The deportations underscored the limited leverage of Taiwan’s government. Even though China and Kenya do not have an extradition treaty, Kenya has no diplomatic relations with Taiwan, a self-governing island that China considers part of its territory. As outrage mounted in Taiwan over what officials called an “uncivilized act of extrajudicial abduction,” China’s Ministry of Public Security released a statement Wednesday saying that 32 Chinese citizens and 45 Taiwanese, including 10 now in China, “had been falsely presenting themselves as law enforcement officers to extort money from people on the Chinese mainland through telephone calls,” according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. It said that the syndicate was based in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, and that it had cheated mainland Chinese in nine provinces out of millions of renminbi, the Chinese currency. Some victims committed suicide because of the huge financial losses, the Xinhua report said. The Ministry of Public Security defended the deportations by claiming that some suspects in previous telecommunications fraud cases had been freed in Taiwan after their repatriation. “Because of the separate handling of these cases, many suspects of cybercrime in Taiwan have not received the proper punishment, and stolen funds have not been able to be returned to China,” the statement said. The ministry said that Chinese officials had been in contact with Taiwan and would invite Taiwanese officials to China for discussions on fraud cases. Even as anger grew, the Taiwanese government appeared to be hoping for some sort of negotiation. On Wednesday, an official in Taiwan’s Justice Ministry said that the ministry wanted China to send the Taiwanese home, but that China had acted according to principles of legal jurisdiction because the suspects had been operating abroad, according to a report on Wednesday in The Taipei Times. Deporting suspects to third countries is not illegal under international law, said Julian Ku, a professor of international law at Hofstra University. China also has the right under international law to prosecute people suspected of committing crimes directed at Chinese territory, Mr. Ku said. “China makes a lot of bad arguments, but this one is pretty good,” he said. But, complicating matters, China and Taiwan have abided since 2009 by their Cross-Strait Joint Crime-Fighting and Judicial Mutual Assistance Agreement, which formalized criminal-justice cooperation and established a procedure for each side to return the other’s citizens in legal cases. In a 2011 fraud case, 14 Taiwanese suspects who had been deported from the Philippines to China were sent back to Taiwan under the agreement. Some experts suspect that China’s change in strategy is a deliberate warning to Taiwan’s newly elected president, Tsai Ing-wen, who will take office in May and has advocated an approach to cross-strait relations that is more cautious than her predecessor’s. “The Chinese are definitely trying to send a message,” Mr. Ku said. “Before this case, the Taiwanese were used to being consulted by China. The level of trust that made the agreement work seems to have broken down.” |