Putting Meng Wanzhou on trial would be ‘triumph for rule of law’, Canadian government lawyer says

Name: Trudeau rejects releasing Meng Wanzhou to free detained Canadians in China
Uploaded: 2021-03-04T20:44:12.000Z
Duration: 54 s
Description: Trudeau rejects releasing Meng Wanzhou to free detained Canadians in China

Robert Frater ridiculed defence claims that comments by Donald Trump had tainted Meng Wanzhou’s prosecution, describing the argument as ‘adjectives in search of facts’

He said justice would be served if the Huawei executive were to be extradited and put on trial for fraud, ‘whether she is convicted or acquitted’

4-MIN READ4-MIN

Huawei Technologies executive Meng Wanzhou leaves her Vancouver home to attend an extradition hearing in Vancouver on Monday. Photo: Agence France-Presse

Ian Youngin Vancouver

Published: 4:44am, 5 Mar 2021Updated: 5:53am, 25 Dec 2021

Corrected [2:04am, 6 Mar, 2021]

[2:04am, 6 Mar, 2021]
A previous version of this story, relying on a litigation schedule, incorrectly reported that the hearing was adjourned until Friday, March 5. In fact, the hearing will resume on March 15.

Putting Meng Wanzhou on trial for fraud would be “a triumph for the rule of law”, a Canadian government lawyer said at an extradition hearing for the Huawei Technologies Co. executive on Thursday in Vancouver, as he rejected claims that former US president Donald Trump and other politicians had irreparably tainted her legal proceedings.

Meng’s defence team has depicted her as a pawn in a new cold war between the US and China, battling for supremacy over the field of 5G technology, in which Huawei is a key player.

They say that the US bid to have her extradited from Canada to face trial in New York is poisoned and should be stayed, and that the case against her has been politicised, citing Trump’s 2018 claim that he would intervene to help strike a trade deal with China.

But government lawyer Robert Frater, representing US interests in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, ridiculed the argument.

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Trudeau rejects releasing Meng Wanzhou to free detained Canadians in China

He told the Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes that the defence characterisation of Trump’s remarks as “shocking, egregious, corrosive, poisonous” were “adjectives in search of facts to support”.