VANCOUVER (CU)_A defence lawyer in the case of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou says the extradition request from the United States, which led to Meng’s arrest violates international law.
During the hearing on Tuesday (30 March), Gib van Ert also told Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes that extradition requests usually heard by Canadian courts involved conduct around the requests which were unlawful.
He claimed that in Meng’s case however, the request itself is unlawful, since American authorities are seeking her on fraud charges which her lawyers claim have no connection to the US.
“We cannot find any such case. We don’t believe that any requesting state has ever made such a request to this country,” van Ert told the judge. “You find yourself in an unusual and even unprecedented situation.”
In December 2018, Meng was arrested in Vancouver, on a US warrant accusing her of putting HSBC at risk of violating US sanction laws by misleading the bank regarding Huawei’s business dealings with Iran. Although the payments between Huawei and the subsidiary in Iran were made in American dollars and cleared though banks in the US, however, van Ert said claims this connection is “incidental” and not substantial.
He went on to say that at the heart of international law is that all states have equal legal authority and that they cannot extend their law into other nations without sufficient interest in the matter. He noted that for example, if Meng was an American nation, the extradition request made by the US would be appropriate.
A few exceptions to this requirement would be a crime committed in a foreign country which poses a threat to another’s national security, which is not the case in this trial, the defence lawyer pointed out.
This case of the Huawei executive has severely damaged relations between Canada and China, with Beijing detaining two Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, just days after Meng’s arrest.
She is currently on bail, living in one of her multi-million-dollar houses in Vancouver with her husband and children.
