Is Vanuatu’s deportation of six Chinese nationals an erosion of its democratic rights at Beijing’s bidding?
- The Pacific nation’s government has defended the actions as routine law enforcement activity, but critics fear its rule of law is being undermined
- The case takes place against a backdrop of global misgivings about China’s legal system, including the Hong Kong protests and New Zealand’s blocking of an extradition
The Chinese police officers touched down at Vanuatu’s main gateway, Bauerfield International Airport in the capital Port Vila, on a Wednesday afternoon. A little over a week later, on July 6, the law enforcement officers, dressed in plain clothes and accompanied by Vanuatu police, marched a half-dozen Chinese nationals onto a chartered jet bound for China.
Their deportation has earned criticism from Vanuatu’s legal experts and human rights activists, who say it is an erosion of democratic rights done at China’s bidding.
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Local media reported the six were held at a property owned by a Chinese state-owned construction company for a number of days, and four of them had recently acquired Vanuatu citizenship through participation in the nation’s controversial passport sale programme.
The programme does not require investment or residence, only an exchange of cash for a Vanuatuan passport, and was launched in part to target wealthy Chinese investors.
The citizenship of the four suspects was revoked by Port Vila before the six were deported.
Vanuatu’s internal affairs minister Andrew Napuat on Tuesday told the Daily Post the Chinese side had not informed the government of the charges against the six suspects but he insisted Vanuatu police and immigration had been fully in control of what he said was a “normal operation”.
China’s Ministry of Public Security provided arrest warrants for the group via the Chinese embassy, he said.
“To those other foreigners who have obtained Vanuatu passports through the citizenship programme, you must understand that the government can revoke your passports at any time if you are caught in illegal acts,” Napuat told the Daily Post. “We will be strengthening our border compliance and rules.”
The minister added that Chinese law enforcement personnel were needed for their technological expertise because there had been “evidence” of cybercrime.
You must understand that the government can revoke your passports at any time if you are caught in illegal acts
Vanuatu follows English common law and grants its citizens the right to access a lawyer as well as a 24-hour window in which suspects must be released or brought before a magistrate to set conditions for bail.
John Malcolm, a lawyer at Geoffrey Gee and Partners in Port Vila, said that in the absence of a court order it was unlawful for the six to have been held at the Chinese construction company’s property against their will.
“I find it hard to believe that they all consented to sit there with … Chinese policemen and consented to voluntarily get on a plane to China,” Malcolm said.
Marie-Noelle Patterson, a lawyer at Hudson & Co in the Pacific nation’s capital, said the Office of the Ombudsman should investigate the case because the six should have been given the chance to call a lawyer, who could have sought an interim injunction challenging their removal in court.
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“It looks like they were not given the opportunity to call anyone,” said Patterson, who served as Vanuatu’s first ombudsman during the mid-1990s.
The case has also raised questions about protections granted to new citizens under Vanuatu’s Development Support Programme.
Most of the passport purchasers do not relocate to Vanuatu, instead acquiring the travel documents for the visa-free access they provide to 122 countries and territories, including the European Union, as well as the protections and legal rights under Vanuatu’s parliamentary democracy, said Jonathan Pryke, director of the Pacific Islands programme at Sydney’s Lowy Institute.
“There is an expectation with the passport sales that you’re buying yourself certain rights,” Pryke said. “This [deportation] really devalues that.”
This January alone, the Vanuatu government gained 1.3 billion Vanuatu vatu (US$11.4 million) in revenue from passport sales – an increase of nearly 40 per cent from the corresponding month in 2018, according to statistics from the Department of Finance and Treasury cited by the Daily Post.
More than 1,800 passports were issued through Vanuatu’s programmes for citizenship by investment in 2018, according to a Daily Post estimate. Figures from the International Monetary Fund indicate the programme generated more than US$30 million for the nation in 2017.
There is an expectation with the passport sales that you’re buying yourself certain rights
The deportations have also reignited a long-smouldering controversy over China’s influence in Vanuatu.
Beijing has financed a raft of large-scale projects in the country over the past 10 years, including a US$79 million wharf, a US$26 million IT system for the government, and a US$13 million convention centre.
In May, Prime Minister Charlot Salwai held his first one-on-one meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and also met with Premier Li Keqiang. During the visit, the two sides signed a joint communique affirming respect for each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as a memorandum of understanding on the Belt and Road Initiative.
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After the visit, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson paraphrased Xi as saying: “We have no private interests in island countries, and do not seek a so-called ‘sphere of influence’.”
Vanuatu is at the centre of an increasingly heated rivalry in the South Pacific, as China, the United States and Western allies such as Australia jockey for influence in the region.
Chinese loans account for about half of the country’s current external debt of US$290 million.
Tess Newton Cain, principal at TNC Pacific Consulting and a Vanuatu citizen, said there were concerns in Vanuatu that the nation’s relationship with China “is possibly too close and causing problems”.
“Vanuatu has had this reputation of doing things the right way, so this is a bit of a backwards step – or it looks that way,” she said.
Attempts by the South China Morning Post to obtain a comment from the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Vanuatu were unsuccessful. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to make a statement, while the Chinese embassy in Vanuatu has not commented on the case.
Vanuatu has had this reputation of doing things the right way, so this is a bit of a backwards step – or it looks that way
The incident recalls the August 2017 extradition without trial of 77 Chinese nationals from Fiji, another Pacific island nation that has grown increasingly close to Beijing. At the time, a Vanuatu foreign ministry official said such actions “could never happen here”.
Eric Cheung Tat-ming, principal law lecturer at University of Hong Kong’s law faculty, said nations might not be willing to send accused criminals back to China if they could not be certain how they would be treated there.
“More democratic and developed countries normally will be concerned whether anyone being extradited back to China could receive a fair trial or guarantee the protection of their minimum human rights,” he said, pointing to a case in New Zealand last month where a court blocked the extradition of a man facing murder charges in China.
