Safeguard Defenders are absolutely not a legit human rights organisation. They’re a shadowy anti-China, increasingly anti-global south think tank with extremely criminal-intelligence connections. They portray themselves as a kind of lawfare org, primarily made up of Chinese human rights lawyers and that it grew out of the government crackdown on foreign agents (they say NGOs) when it was called China Action.

They operated for at least two years in a quasi-legal capacity before finally registering as an NGO in spain, where it’s extremely easy to do so. Yet they also openly acknowledge that they keep the vast majority of their ‘operatives’ and financial partners secret with vague handwaving about how to name them would put them in danger ‘all over the world’. This is despite the fact that Spanish law for NGOs and charities requires you to keep and publish a list of all associated personel. Strangely, despite this, they’ve never been legally challenged on this.

The founder, Peter Dahlin, was the removed(or asset) who was detained in China in 2016 before a deal behind the scenes was agreed to allow him to leave, back to the West, if he gave a confession on Chinese TV. He left China and then immeadiately did an enormous and suspiciously well promoted by Western state media press tour fair bigger than anything Action China had achieved, where he told the story of being kept on a Chinese ‘black site’ for 23 days and interrogated and forced into a confession, including vague but sinister sounding stories about being forcibly hooked to things like a ‘Chinese confession machine’. He never substantiated or elaborated on these claims as far as I could ever tell.

At both China Action, and some of his other associated work, he’s had multiple funding connections to the US state department and CIA cut outs from the obvious (NED) to smaller Washington think tank fronts. When confronted on the NED funding in one interview he said it was:

“limited to a few hundred thousand dollars through the five years the program ran.”

He never specified the amount, provided accounts, or referenced funding from other US and intelligence linked sources. Meanwhile, as he played the NED connection down, Washington intelligence front orgs just kept promoting both China Action and then Safeguard Defenders for years, including on the Democracy Digest blog - the official thinkpiece blog for NED.

Oddly, some of the few named people from Safeguard Defenders have turned up at events and panels for and with all sorts of other spooky, pro-Western causes including on Russia and Ukraine. They also seemed to have an in with the Conservative Party Human Rights Commision (CPHRC) here in the the UK. As well as appearing at their events pre-2020, there are public letters and documents showing that during the Coronavirus lockdowns here in the UK and abroad, they were providing spurious talking points and political pressure about the dangers of lockdowns and how China was using the Coronavirus response as cover for a massive crackdown against millions of ‘dissidents’. Since their introduction or public integration with the CPHRC, it has pretty much only pushed for anti-China policy and focused entirely on anti-China propaganda.

On a personal note, someone I knew who worked with Amnesty once said on the subject of Peter Dahlin that it was “weird” becasue most of the people he knew had never met the guy, but Dahlin seemed to “know everyone in fucking Westminster”.

Thinly veiled anti-lockdown, Covid-conspiracy talking points aren’t exactly the only thing that Safeguard Defenders have pushed that’s decidedly dodgy either. Naturally they were all in on Uyghur genocide narrative including some of the more extreme claims that even news orgs and think tanks didn’t want to touch because they were basically completely unsourced and obviously spurious. Then of course there’s the fact that their main ‘success’ has been that they’re essentially the sole source and propaganda mechanism for the Chinese Police Stations Abroad story that was absolutely everywhere for a year. Keep in mind that these got elevated by press and Western governments to the point that said governments started serious criminal and intelligence investigations into the matter. Basically all of them found zero evidence of anything nefarious, instead just video conferencing facilities to help Chinese citizens abroad do things like renew their driver’s licenses when they couldn’t fly back to China to do so. Politicians made a few small speeches in parliments, before letting everyone to forget it all.

Until this week. When Safeguard Defenders have suddenly popped up in the press again as New York gets a ‘confession’ of one Chinese national to running one of these ‘secret police stations’. Of course, anyone familiar with the American justice system, especially in regards to the prosecution of supposed foreign agents, will know that a guilty plea is far from a confession never mind a legitimate and often the result of entrapment or a trail which is a forgone conclusion, forcing the defendent to deal for a lighter sentence. Similarly of course, Peter Dahlin himself got out of China after his supposed black site imprisonment and interogation on a negotiated deal but only after publicly confessing. In the US of course it’s legitimate. In China of course it’s further proof of their nefarious authoritarianism.

Recently Safeguard Defenders announced that they’re opening a brand new office and staffing up for local ‘operatives’ to set their sights on a new location…

…that office and focus is in Taiwan.