Taiwan suing Kenya over illegal deportation of its nationals
ROC Central News Agency
2016/04/13 12:08:12
Taipei, April 13 (CNA) Taiwan has taken legal action against Kenya for what it called the illegal deportation of its nationals to China, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said Wednesday.
In a written statement to the Legislature's Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, the ministry said that in addition to lodging a strong protest over Kenya's deportation of 45 Taiwanese since April 8, it has initiated legal action in the country.
The head of Taiwan's representative office in South Africa, who went to Kenya after the first deportations on April 8, asked a lawyer that day to file suit against Kenya's interior minister, police inspector general and attorney general.
Taiwan is arguing that those officials allowed Kenyan police to ignore a court injunction in forcefully detaining Taiwanese citizens for more than 24 hours and illegally working with officials from China's embassy to deport them to China.
Because the detentions and deportations violated the Taiwanese citizens' human rights, Taiwan also appealed for help to Kenya's National Commission on Human Rights, which transferred the case to the Independent Policing Oversight Authority for further investigation.
The case originated in 2014 when Kenyan police investigated a fire in a Nairobi suburb in which a Chinese man died and arrested people on charges of setting up telecommunications equipment there to commit transnational fraud.
Police later arrested a total of 38 Taiwanese citizens in three separate moves.
Ten of them were found not guilty of the charges in a court and returned to Taiwan after paying a fine for illegally being in the country.
Twenty-three of the other 28 are at the center of the controversy. They were acquitted by a Kenyan court on charges related to setting up the telecommunications equipment without a license and were released on the spot.
But China's embassy in Kenya intervened with Kenyan police to have them taken from the court to the police station to be illegally detained, according to the Foreign Ministry's statement.
Eight of the 23 were put on a China Southern Airlines flight to China on April 8.
On the same day, Kenya police arrested another batch of telecommunications fraud suspects, among whom were 22 Taiwanese.
The 22 were later put on a flight to China with the 15 other Taiwanese who were previously acquitted by a Kenyan court, prompting further protests from Taiwan.
China has argued that the Taiwanese were part of a fraud ring with Chinese stationed in Kenya that was cheating people in China through telephone fraud.
Fraud rings trying to scam people in China have increasingly resorted to setting up equipment outside of the region to avoid the reach of Beijing authorities as they crack down on telephone fraud.
Another five Taiwanese, who were among the 38 arrested after the building fire in 2014, are scheduled to go on trial in June, and Taiwan's government is doing all it can to ensure they will not be sent to China, the Foreign Ministry said.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said, meanwhile, that Taiwan could not accept China's contention that the incident be handled under the "one China" policy.
The Republic of China (Taiwan) is a sovereign state and has full jurisdiction over its nationals, the MAC said.
Kenya's acquiescence to China's demands could be related to its growing dependence on Beijing for financial support, especially as financing from traditional foreign creditors Japan and France has stagnated or declined.
Just last week a new loan of 530 million euros from China was finalized to cover Kenya's budget deficit, according to an RFI (Radio France International) report on April 11.
That came not long after the World Bank warned in March that more Chinese loans could bring Kenya's heavy debt burden to unsustainable levels.
(By Tang Pei-chun, Justine Su and Lilian Wu)
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