BEIJING (CU)_The trial of Michael Kovrig, the second Canadian who has been detained in China for more than two years on spying charges, is underway in Beijing in a closed courtroom.
According to Jim Nickel, charge d’affaires of the Canadian Embassy in China, Canadian diplomats had made several requests to be granted permission to attend the proceedings, but were denied access.
“Now we see that the court process itself is not transparent. We’re very troubled by this,” he told reporters outside the Beijing court after the trial began.
Meanwhile 28 diplomats from 26 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia, were also present outside the court house on Monday (22 March), in a show of solidarity.
Charge d’affaires of the US embassy in China, William Klein, revealed that President Jose Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have said that in dealing with the cases of the two Canadians, Washington will treat the pair “as if they were American citizens”.
Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, commonly knowns as the two Michaels, were detained in China nine days after the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese Huawei official in Vancouver, on a US extradition request.
The detention of the pair is widely perceived in the West as retaliation for the arrest of the Huawei CFO, although Beijing denies these claims, saying they are being held on suspicion of endangering national security.
On Friday, Spavor also stood trial in a closed courtroom in in the city of Dandong, in the north-eastern region of China. The hearing ended at noon with no verdict being announced.
Beijing claims that Canadian and other diplomats were not allowed to attend the trials owing to national security concerns, while Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called this lack of transparency being “completely unacceptable”.
