A Chinese court sentenced a Canadian to death in a sudden retrial of his drug smuggling case, while another Canadian man has been denied diplomatic immunity, ratcheting up the tensions following Canada’s arrest of a top Chinese technology executive in December 2018. Canada–China relations…
A Chinese court sentenced a Canadian to death in a sudden retrial of his drug smuggling case, while another Canadian man has been denied diplomatic immunity, ratcheting up the tensions following Canada’s arrest of a top Chinese technology executive in December 2018.
Background
Canada–China relations, relations officially date back to 1942 when Canada sent an ambassador to China. Before then, Canada had been represented by the British ambassador.
China was Canada’s largest trading partner in Asia for some years, including 2017; it was Canada’s top export market and it was Canada’s top import supplier in Asia. On the other hand, Canada had a significant trade imbalance, importing CAD$44.235 billion more from China than the value of its exports to that country in 2016.
On 1 December 2018, the chief financial officer of Huawei’s deputy chair and CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver at an extradition request by U.S. authorities on suspicion of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. On 10 December 2018, former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig was detained by the Beijing Bureau of Chinese State Security. Then the senior adviser in Hong Kong for the International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution think tank based in Brussels, Kovrig had worked for the diplomatic service in Beijing and Hong Kong until 2016. On 12 December 2018, the Communist Party-run newspaper Global Times had warned that “if Canada extradites Meng to the U.S., China’s revenge will be far worse than detaining a Canadian”.
Analysis
The Liaoning provincial court in northeastern China announced the death sentence for Robert Lloyd Schellenberg on Monday, reversing a 15-year prison term from a November 2018 sentencing. Schellenberg first went on trial in 2016.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau strongly condemned Monday’s proceeding, suggesting that China was using its judicial system to pressure Canada over the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. In his strongest comments yet, Trudeau said: “all countries around the world” should be concerned that Beijing is acting arbitrarily with its justice system.
“It is of extreme concern to us as a government, as it should be to all our international friends and allies, that China has chosen to begin to arbitrarily apply a death penalty,” Trudeau said. Canada later updated its travel advisory for China urging Canadians to “exercise a high degree of caution due to the risk of arbitrary enforcement of local laws.”
Further escalating the diplomatic rift between the two countries, a Chinese spokeswoman said earlier on Monday that Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat taken into custody in an apparent retaliation for Meng’s arrest, was not eligible for diplomatic immunity as Trudeau has maintained.
A senior Canadian government official said Chinese officials have been questioning Kovrig about his diplomatic work in China, which is a major reason why Trudeau is asserting diplomatic immunity. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly about the case, spoke on condition of anonymity.
Kovrig, a Northeast Asia analyst for the International Crisis Group think tank, was on a leave of absence from the Canadian government at the time of his arrest last month. Schellenberg was detained more than four years ago and initially sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2016. But within weeks of Meng’s Dec. 1 arrest, an appeals court suddenly reversed that decision, saying the sentence was too lenient, and scheduled Monday’s retrial with just four days’ notice. The court gave no indication that the death penalty could be commuted, but observers said Schellenberg’s fate is likely to be drawn into diplomatic negotiations over China’s demand for the release of Meng.
A former Canadian ambassador to China, Guy Saint-Jacques, said interrogating Kovrig about his time as a diplomat in China would violate Vienna Convention protections of residual diplomatic immunity – that means a country is not allowed to question someone on the work they did when they were a diplomat.
Assessment
Our assessment is that the Chinese court’s decision to award the death penalty on a Canadian citizen is not a coincidence considering the recent diplomatic standoff between the two countries. We believe that China is not going to back down and will proceed with the execution in retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei CFO Weng.
Read more:
Leave a Reply