Meng Wanzhou: lawyers seek halt to ‘poisoned’ case, accusing Trump and Trudeau of meddling

Name: Trudeau rejects releasing Meng Wanzhou to free detained Canadians in China
Uploaded: 2020-07-24T10:30:06.000Z
Duration: 54 s
Description: Trudeau rejects releasing Meng Wanzhou to free detained Canadians in China

They call for Vancouver court to stay proceedings against Meng in new legal submissions, based on claims of political interference and abuse of process

The United States wants Meng extradited from Canada to face bank fraud charges in New York

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Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou leaves her Vancouver home to attend an extradition hearing in May. She is under partial house arrest. Photo: Bloomberg

Ian Young

Published: 6:30pm, 24 Jul 2020Updated: 5:53am, 25 Dec 2021

Lawyers for Meng Wanzhou are calling for a Vancouver court to halt extradition proceedings against the Huawei executive, in legal submissions accusing US President Donald Trump of having “poisoned” the case for political purposes, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of complicity in using Meng as a “bargaining chip”.

“Where the requesting state engages in conduct that offends our Canadian sense of fair play and decency, the court must intervene to safeguard the integrity of the judicial process. This is such a case,” Meng’s lawyers say in their new submissions.

They have filed two applications on separate grounds for the case to be stayed as an abuse of process, asking that Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes of the British Columbia Supreme Court hear the matters in February 2021. The documents were released late on Thursday.

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Trudeau rejects releasing Meng Wanzhou to free detained Canadians in China

The first application is based on claims of political interference. The supporting arguments by Meng’s lawyers, led by Richard Peck, begin by quoting Trump’s comments from December 12, 2018, 11 days after Meng’s arrest at Vancouver’s airport, in which he said he would “certainly intervene” in Meng’s case if he thought it was good for a trade deal with China.

Those comments have already been much discussed in the ongoing extradition proceedings and preliminary hearings. The US wants Meng extradited from Canada to face trial in New York on bank fraud charges.

But Peck and his colleagues go on to cite instances of Trump’s intervention in other cases to support the argument about his willingness to “leverage her [Meng’s] prosecution for political purposes”.

These include his interventions in the cases involving his friend and political ally Roger Stone, whom he recently pardoned after convictions for witness tampering and lying to investigators, and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

“In their initial filing, [US] Department of Justice prosecutors submitted that Mr Stone should be sentenced to seven to 10 years’ imprisonment. President Trump publicly disagreed with that position,” the submission says, citing a Trump tweet in which he calls Stone’s situation a “miscarriage of justice”.