A Belgrade billboard in April 2020 showing Chinese leader Xi Jinping says, “Thanks, Brother Xi.”
And since Xi came to power in late 2012, Safeguard Defenders has recorded nearly 70 attempts by the Chinese government to have 400 people extradited to China. Most of them were in Europe and the extradition requests were deemed to be based on tenuous legal grounds.
Serbia has signed extradition treaties with numerous countries, such as the United States, Germany, Belarus, Turkey, Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
But in the last five years, courts in more than a dozen European Union member states have stopped adhering to extradition requests from China, due to suspicion that the person whose extradition is sought would face repression, abuse, and extrajudicial retaliation back home.
A Serbian Snapshot
In the cases documented in the data obtained by RFE/RL about Serbia extraditing Chinese nationals, all five of the Chinese were pursued on criminal charges — three on charges of fraud, one for money laundering, and one for inflicting serious bodily harm.
All five cases took place under Serbian domestic law that covers international criminal issues.
The new treaty, if ratified by parliament, could streamline that process, Vidosavljevic says. But he adds that with the contents of the deal signed in May not publicly available, there are concerns among human rights advocates as to whether all elements of the agreement will be disclosed.
The contract Serbia signed with China raised concern among human rights experts because it has still not been made public, Vidosavljevic adds.
Several contracts signed between Belgrade and the Chinese government or Chinese state-owned companies remain secret and came under scrutiny.
Most recently, there has been public backlash over the contracts with Chinese construction companies that renovated and rebuilt parts of the main railway station in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, whose roof collapsed and killed 15 people.
Serbian authorities said Chinese firms did not replace the roof that collapsed and that the contracts will not be publicly disclosed due to secrecy provisions in the deals.
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Publish date : 2024-12-04 22:42:00
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