Agreements signed in Serbia during Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit last month could limit media freedom in the country and increase China’s reach, warn experts and activists who spoke to Radio Free Europe.
“I think anyone who is considered by Beijing to be a critic of the regime should think twice before traveling to Serbia,” says Laura Harth, from the human rights organization Safeguard Defenders.
Harth thus refers to an extradition agreement signed in Belgrade during Xia’s state visit on May 7 and 8.
It is one of 28 agreements signed that day between Beijing and Belgrade, which are related to a range of issues – from infrastructure to energy.
But it is the extradition deal that has set off alarm bells among human rights activists, who say Serbia’s lack of judicial independence could open the door to abuse by Chinese officials.
“The signing of an extradition agreement with China, in itself, is not controversial, but the issue is how it will be implemented,” Petar Vidosavlević, from the Belgrade Center for Human Rights, told Radio Free Europe’s Balkan Service.
Independent journalists expressed similar concerns about the cooperation agreements signed by Serbia’s three main pro-government media outlets and the press service of President Aleksandar Vučić together with China Media Group – the body that oversees China’s state broadcaster.
While the text of these agreements has not been made fully public and they will need to be ratified by the Serbian Parliament to take effect, activists warn that the agreements – when combined with Serbia’s deteriorating media environment – could further reduce the space for information independent in this country.
“The fear is that this will lead to an increase in anti-European narratives throughout the Balkans,” says Antoinette Nikolova, director of the Initiative for Free Balkan Media, for Radio Free Europe.
“The Serbian information environment is already saturated with Russian propaganda and now it will also become a place for Chinese narratives,” she says.
The slippery slope to extradition
Serbia has signed extradition treaties with many countries, such as: the United States, Germany, Belarus, Turkey, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
But in the past five years, courts in several European Union member states have stopped enforcing extradition requests from China, due to concerns that the person – whose extradition is sought – would face extrajudicial repression, abuse and retaliation.
According to the organization Safeguard Defenders, China has signed more than 60 bilateral extradition treaties with various countries in the world, and more than 40 of them have been ratified by national parliaments.
Since Xi took power in late 2012, Safeguard Defenders has documented nearly 70 attempts by the Chinese government to return 400 people to China through extradition proceedings.
Most of them have been in Europe and the requests for extradition have been considered weak in terms of legal basis.
The new extradition agreement is expected to strengthen a wider network of legal arrangements that Belgrade has signed with Beijing in recent years.
In 2019, Serbia and China signed an agreement on joint police patrols between the two countries, which allowed Chinese officers to work together with their Serbian counterparts to address the flow of tourists and workers from China to Serbia.
Belgrade was also one of 54 Chinese “police stations” abroad, which were operated by Chinese authorities to pressure citizens to return to China.
While most of the cases documented by overseas police stations appear to be suspected crimes such as fraud or corruption, dissidents also reported that such stations were used to monitor and threaten them.
Safeguard Defenders, the organization that first documented the stations, said the Chinese station in Belgrade was used for a forced return case.
Citing Chinese government documents, the NGO said that in 2018, a Chinese national living in Belgrade, identified only as Xia, was accused of theft in China and “persuaded to return”.
According to the human rights group, he was identified by the Belgrade station and contacted through the Chinese messaging platform WeChat, where he was eventually “convinced” to return to China after initially being reluctant to leave Serbia.
Extradition agreements are common around the world, but international law requires that they also follow the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits a country from returning someone to a country where there is a risk of persecution, torture or violations of human rights. other human rights.
Vidosavlević says the new deal is worrying, given Belgrade’s willingness to comply with extradition requests, whether or not they meet the principle of non-refoulement, and cites some past examples with Turkey.
Harth of Safeguard Defenders says the deal also sends a worrying message to Chinese citizens abroad.
“All this causes a heightened sense of fear in the Chinese diaspora communities, which are receiving messages from Beijing that they can be reached anywhere,” she says.
Media cooperation
Since Xi launched his Belt and Road (BRI) foreign policy project a decade ago, he has focused on financing and building infrastructure projects around the world. The reach of Chinese media has also been in focus.
At a BRI forum in October 2023, China Media Group – an umbrella company that oversees state media entities such as Xinhua News Agency, Global Television Network (CGTN) and China Radio International – announced that it has signed contracts with 682 media organizations in 151 countries of the world and that there are broadcasts in more than 40 languages.
The agreements signed on May 8 in Belgrade established cooperation between China Media Group and three Serbian pro-government media: Radio-Television of Serbia, Politika daily newspaper and Tanjug news agency.
Tamara Skroza, journalist and member of the Press Council – a body that monitors the ethics of journalism in Serbian media – says that agreements with Serbian media highlight the lack of transparency in cooperation.
“We are not sure about the extent [of the cooperation], as well as the limitations that these media may face, due to such agreements… whether they will affect their editorial stance or whether it is, simply, an exchange direct content”, she says for the Balkan Service of Radio Free Europe.
Skroza adds that the existing pro-Chinese narratives in Serbia will become “even more pronounced after the signing of agreements and memoranda”.
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranked Serbia 98th out of 180 countries listed in its 2024 Press Freedom Index.
This was Serbia’s lowest position since the creation of the index in 2002.
Tanjug and Politika did not respond to Radio Free Europe’s requests for comment, while Radio-Television of Serbia said it has been engaged in various types of partnerships with Chinese media companies since 2013.
The channels of this company also have a term dedicated to Chinese documentaries since 2017.
“So far we have broadcast more than 200 Chinese documentaries, covering various aspects such as: [China’s] history, customs, cuisine, culture, specific crafts, monuments and daily life,” a company spokesperson told the News Service. Balkans of Radio Free Europe.
He added that the new agreement focuses on ways to “facilitate the sharing of content and encourage co-productions”.
According to him, the company has similar agreements with broadcasters from Bulgaria, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Hungary.
Skroza says the exchange of culturally-themed content is not problematic, but that the deal is troubling if it leads to a censored and distorted portrayal of life and politics in China, as well as Beijing’s policies around the world.
“The problem is not in what they will present in their programs, but in what they will not present”, says Skroza.
“If we only show images of Chinese folklore and nature, we are not, in fact, informing the citizens of Serbia about the real situation,” she concludes. /REL
