Lawyers for huawei‘s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou argued Monday (March 29) that the U.S. fraud charges against her occurred on Chinese soil and have nothing to do with the United States. The lawyer also said that Meng’s extradition from Canada to the United States would violate international law.
Meng was arrested by Canadian police in December 2018 at the request of the United States. The U.S. accused Huawei of using a Hong Kong shell company called Starcom to sell telecommunications equipment to Iran, and charged Meng with wire and bank fraud for making false statements to banks to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Iran.
There is an extradition treaty between the U.S. and Canada, and the U.S. Department of Justice has also issued a request to Canada for Meng’s extradition.
According to AFP, Meng’s defense lawyer, Gib van Ert, said Meng’s meeting with the bank was in China and had nothing to do with Canada or the United States. He said, “If any law was violated that day, it happened on Chinese territory and is something China should worry about.”
He added: “What happened between a Chinese man and an Anglo-Chinese bank at a restaurant in Hong Kong has nothing to do with the United States under international law.”
The lawyer also said that if Canada facilitated Meng’s extradition to the United States, that in itself would be a violation of international law.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported that prosecutors argued that the U.S. has jurisdiction (jurisdiction) because financial transactions handled by HSBC for Huawei need to go through the U.S. dollar system, which means they technically go through U.S. territory. But Elter, for his part, argued that this procedure, known as dollar settlement, was not sufficient to establish jurisdiction.
He added that the U.S. prosecution of Meng in a New York court and “her capture in Canada through extradition proceedings are serious misconduct,” and accused the U.S. of abusing the extradition process.
The report added that the debate over jurisdiction is expected to continue for several more days, after which the extradition process will be suspended for three weeks.
Meng has been confined to her Vancouver mansion since being released on bail and has been under constant surveillance.
Chinese Communist authorities arrested Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig (known as Kang Mingkai in Chinese) and Michael Spavor on Dec. 10, 2018, and charged them in June 2020 with “spying on state secrets and intelligence for foreign countries” and “The two men were formally indicted in June 2020 on charges of “stealing and illegally providing state secrets outside the country. This is widely seen by the international community as a retaliation for Meng’s case. But China insists that the detention of the two Canadian citizens is not related to Meng’s case.
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