European Interest

Poland raises call for Huawei boycott

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Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.

The Chinese telecom giant’s industrial espionage activities in Poland have prompted calls for the company to be banned. But while the US is leading the drive for a boycott, EU governments remain undecided.

Poland is putting pressure on the European Union to ban Chinese telecom giant Huawei. The call comes after Huawei executive Wang Weijing in Poland was arrested.

As reported by Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, the Unite States has already launched an effort to blacklist the company internationally over security concerns. Several countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia and New Zealand already have followed the US call, but the picture in Europe is more nuanced.

Here’s something interesting, Germany’s biggest telecoms firm, Deutsche Telekom, is reviewing its vendor plans in the country and other European markets where it operates.

“I think Germany is right to not blindly follow any foreign advice regarding Chinese 5G manufacturers,” Jan-Peter Kleinhans, project director for IoT Security at Berlin-based think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, told DW.

Meanwhile, Huawei is reportedly making great efforts to prove its good faith. It has opened test labs for its equipment in Germany and the UK in cooperation with the governments there, and is to launch another in Brussels by the end of the first quarter.

Huawei rotating chairman Guo Ping in late December complained that his company was being subjected to “incredibly unfair treatment”. He said: “Huawei has never and will never present a security threat”.

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