The Chinese communist regime’s campaign to silence dissent outside its borders has taken yet another turn.
A recent report by Graphika reveals how a Chinese state-linked influence operation, Spamouflage, manipulated event flyers and spread false information to sabotage a Safeguard Defenders event in Lisbon, in yet another attempt to undermine any critical discussions about the regime’s abuse of its criminal justice system.
The report also found similar tactics being used to target other recent events.
At the heart of the controversy was Safeguard Defenders’ June 16 event in Portugal, co-hosted with the American Club of Lisbon, titled “When Borders Don’t Protect: Arbitrary Detention and State-to-State Hostage Taking.” The event was held to release a new report, “Behind Bars.”
The report presents information and cases in which individuals were held incommunicado, denied due process, subjected to severe torture, and forced to confess, revealing systemic and widespread failures in China’s legal system.
The event also assembled a panel of experts and former victims to discuss how Chinese authorities arbitrarily detain foreign nationals, including journalists, scholars, activists, and businesspeople, as bargaining chips in diplomatic negotiations. The panel included the UK’s Peter Humphrey, myself from Safeguard Defenders, and Grace Chen, former legal adviser to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.
The goal was clear: confuse attendees, discredit the organizers, and derail the discussion.
Hours before the report was released in the early hours of June 16, the Safeguard Defenders website went offline for no apparent reason, though no evidence of external tampering has been found so far.
This was not an isolated incident. Graphika identified similar tactics recently used to disrupt pro-Tibet and Uyghur protests in New York, San Francisco, Portland, and Berlin, where altered flyers spread incorrect times and locations, again aiming to sabotage participation.
By targeting events like Safeguard Defenders’, the Chinese regime aims to suppress global scrutiny of its abuses. In this case, that effort backfired, as it so often does, drawing far more attention not only to the report itself but also to the underlying issues, while exposing the CCP’s desperate need to silence dissent even abroad.
Not long after the event and the ensuing attention to Beijing’s attempt to suppress it, Liberal Initiative, a parliamentary group in the Portuguese parliament, called on the prime minister to summon the Chinese ambassador and make clear, in no uncertain terms, that Portugal will not tolerate foreign interference in its democratic spaces.
While we have yet to hear from the Portuguese prime minister, we hope there is a clear understanding that the time to defend free speech is not tomorrow—it is today.
