Canada was yesterday likely to announce that an extradition hearing against a Huawei Technologies Co Ltd executive could proceed, legal experts said, worsening already icy relations with Beijing.
Police arrested Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟) in Vancouver in December last year at Washington’s request.
In late January the US Department of Justice charged Huawei and Meng with conspiring to contravene US sanctions on Iran.
Ottawa had until midnight yesterday to announce whether it would issue an authority to proceed, which would allow a court in the Pacific province of British Columbia to start a formal extradition hearing.
Joanna Harrington, a law professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, said officials were most likely to give the green light.
“I have no reason to see why they wouldn’t. We have an ongoing long-standing extradition relationship between the United States and Canada,” she said by telephone.
“The United States is a country with which we share a legal culture” and which Canada trusts, said Harrington, an international human rights law specialist.
After Meng’s arrest, Canadian officials said that the vast majority of US requests for extradition were approved.
However, it could be years before she is ever sent to the US, since Canada’s slow-moving justice system allows many decisions to be appealed.
Meng, under house arrest, is due to appear in a Vancouver court on March 6 to show authorities she is sticking to the terms of the December deal that allowed her to stay out of prison.
US President Donald Trump in December said he would intervene if it served national security interests or helped close a trade deal with China, prompting Ottawa to stress the extradition process should not be politicized.
Last week, Trump played down the idea of dropping the charges.
Beijing is demanding Meng be released. After her detention, China arrested two Canadians on national security grounds, and a Chinese court later sentenced to death a Canadian man who previously had only been jailed for drug smuggling.
Vancouver criminal defense lawyer Gary Botting, an expert in extradition law, also predicted officials would issue the authority to proceed.
“I have little doubt that they probably will, but it would be very foolish,” he said by phone, saying that an approval would “invite a whole pile of grief” and possible economic retaliation from China.
A spokesman for the Canadian Department of Justice declined to comment.
David Martin, a lawyer for Meng, did not reply to a request for comment.
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
RSS