Photo: JIBC
Vancouver Police Department officers show use of force tactics to Chinese international students.
by Graeme Wood,
Glacier Media Investigates
January 25, 2021
British Columbia’s police academy has a growing international police-training program tailor-made for China’s Public Security Bureau that critics say is a threat to the country’s security and common values.
The Justice Institute of B.C. (JIBC) has accepted close to 2,000 Chinese law enforcement students, recruits and officials, plus dozens of Chinese state judges, to its purported education and training programs, since 2013.
Yet, despite JIBC partnering with some of the world’s most undemocratic countries, whose criminal justice systems enable widespread human rights violations — such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and China — its international law enforcement studies (ILES) program has operated with limited guiding principles and oversight for such considerations, despite being tailor-made for Chinese police academies.
The ILES program is offered to Chinese police academy students, who are China’s future police officers, border agents and prison guards — handpicked by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The program, critics charge, is at best a questionable source of revenue that does nothing to achieve its stated goal of reforming the authoritarian police regime or, at worst, a Trojan horse chock-full of national security threats, such as foreign influence activity, espionage and further offshore human rights violations.
“To think for a second that the Chinese aren’t capable of policing their own people is ridiculous when they have a 99.9% conviction rate,” suggests intelligence analyst and transnational organized crime expert Scott McGregor.
“If you compare the criminal justice system of Canada with the criminal justice system of the People’s Republic of China, you’re going to find the Grand Canyon,” said Simon Fraser University criminologist Rob Gordon.
However, said JIBC president Michel Tarko, hosting Chinese judges, police officials and future Chinese police and law enforcement officers in B.C. provides “exposure to the Canadian criminal justice system to broaden their perspective and their understanding of a different system of law enforcement.
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