Not saying it’s a good idea, just that it’s possible under Canadian law.
Trump’s Justice Department can call it what it wants. She wasn’t arrested for allegedly bilking investors or consumers out of billions of dollars, which would be a perfectly non-political reason for her incarceration. She wasn’t arrested for tax fraud, either.
If she ends up in the US criminal justice system, that’s going to be a political problem, not a legal one. If I were an American or a Canadian diplomat or even a relatively high-level executive living and working in China right now, I’d probably be making arrangements to come back home.
They are calling it what it was…bank fraud. She attempted to deceive the bank about what the loan was for and neglected to tell them that the money would be used in a way that violated the sanctions. Again, whatever you think about the sanctions, the banks would have been on the hook for violating them. That…is…fraud. Which is illegal. Not sure why this keeps coming up to be honest. She wasn’t arrested for political reasons…she was arrested because she broke a law that the Canadians acknowledge IS a law, and one that if she did it to them or in their country they would have arrested her for as well.
Obviously, if Trump DOES simply pardon her and send her back, then this indeed becomes a political issue (from a lot of perspective).
I understand what the law says. I understand should can be prosecuted for violating the letter of the law and even the spirit of the law. It’s still a politically-motivated arrest, and we’re putting Canada in the position of being an abductor.
Again, two can play that game. China has their own laws, many of which people might either wittingly or unwittingly break from time to time. If I were an American or Canadian with any level of influence working or living in China right now, I’d be making plans to GTFO, like fast.
It’s not a politically motivated arrest…Trump is trying to make this arrest into a political football to use to leverage the Chinese in the trade war, but it’s NOT a politically motivated arrest. China (or the CCP anyway) thinks EVERYTHING is politically motivated because that’s how their system works.
China certainly has it’s own laws, and sets them up so that you have to violate them…and then chooses when or if they will enforce those laws or just ignore them. That’s why that rule of law stuff is some nebulous in China. I agree that if I were Canadian or American in China atm I’d be looking to get out for a while until this blows over…and rethinking whether my long term strategy of being there in any case even when it does, since the CCP has used this tactic in the past and will inevitably do so again in the future as well. Their system is such that they set it up so you WILL break rules…it’s not a matter of wittingly or unwittingly, it’s a matter of will they enforce them or will they ignore them. Mostly, they ignore them…until they don’t.
While I believe that the DOJ tries to be nonpolitical, I can’t imagine at this level it is completely ignored. They can’t be totally blasé about setting off an incident like this. And frankly, if this had been say Angela Merkel’s stepson I have a hard time believing they wouldn’t have tried a quieter approach over an extradition request.
Did you send emails to your MP demanding that Canada not submit to China’s kidnapping, terror, and extortion? Should any defender of democracy allow themselves to be subjected to kidnapping and extortion in the name of democracy?
Of course I didn’t - I trust our elected leaders to deal with China being China regardless of how reprehensible they happen to be on any given day.
Merely because the US has historically been the most vocal in proclaiming themselves a democracy, we should ignore Trump flippantly roping us in to a quid-pro-quo? As a defender of democracy, you think Canada should submit to the US’s kidnapping request and hand over a prisoner likely to be traded for political favours?
Yes, Canada could do that. And that would give the US the grounds to break off the extradition treaty, if it saw fit, which wouldn’t be in either country’s long-term interests.
It would also start to raise doubts with other countries about Canada’s reliability and commitment to its freely-assumed treaty obligations.
I hardly think the British or French would start to harbor doubts if we flipped the bird at Trump.
And the fact is, if we really thought that Trump was going to use Huawei as a bargaining chip in a trade negotiation we would be perfectly within our rights under the treaty to refuse the extradition. We can refuse a politically motivated request and the treaty doesn’t say we’re required to follow the steps of the Extradition Act to act on that conclusion.
Interesting developments:
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Canadian Ambassador to China commented a couple of times this week, in China, that Meng would have a good legal defence to extradition, since the US request was essentially political;
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Canadian Ambassador to China fired by Trudeau (okay, technically, Trudeau “asked him to resign”. Yeah, fired.)
A few articles:
CBC: McCallum says Meng has a strong case against extradition. Is he right?
Macleans: Ambassador John McCallum goes rogue in China
CBC: China envoy McCallum walks back comments on Meng Wanzhou case
CNN: Canada’s ambassador to China retracts controversial remarks on Huawei case
National Post: John McCallum forced out as Canada’s ambassador to China after comments on Huawei case
Also, a couple of weeks ago, China sentenced a Canadian drug dealer to death (he previously was only to be imprisoned for 15 years, but China quickly escalated his sentence to death as a tit-for-tat over the Huawei thing.) Highly doubt he’ll actually be executed, but this is becoming hostage politics, as someone put it.
Good move on Trudeau’s part, since it’s kind of a bad thing to have an ambassador spouting the party line from the country he’s in. The whole ‘this is all political!’ is the CCPs line on this. It’s complete bullshit, and not a good thing when your ambassador goes on record as toeing that same line.
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So what is the deal with Huawey? Is their spysoftware incompatible with our spysoftware?
If it’s such a clear-cut case, why aren’t we getting any hard facts or solid evidence? Instead all over the world countries don’t want to include Huawey anymore in biddings because…well, it could be.
To me the whole thing sounds like a negative add/libel campaign gone out of control (or maybe better than expected, depending on who you ask).
You are conflating two different stories. Western countries are excluding Huawey (the company) from national internet infrastructure upgrades because they don’t trust them not to give the Chinese government backdoors and snooping abilities. There’s no criminal case there for evidence to be presented. Huawey was arrested on suspicion of violating banking rules and the US sanctions on Iran.
You may find this interesting and, I hope, informative.
Or, this (from today’s NYT)
…a rebuttal from Amazon.
Tim Cook from Apple asking Bloomberg to retract:
A twitter thread from Swift on Security with a summary of reactions to the Bloomberg story. None of them good.
Banquet Bear - fair enough, but today’s NYT piece seems very balanced and is hardly reassuring, let alone exonerating.