Extradition judge is told she, not minister, must decide if US has jurisdiction over Meng Wanzhou’s actions in Hong Kong
- The case against Meng showed the US had wrongfully engaged in a ‘power grab’ to regulate the conduct of Chinese nationals in Hong Kong, her lawyer said
- Whether the US had a right to prosecute Meng was a legal decision, not a political one, judge is told, and the US ‘doesn’t make law for China’
The United States was engaged in a “power grab” that breached international law by trying to regulate Meng Wanzhou’s conduct in Hong Kong, the Huawei Technologies executive’s lawyer told her extradition hearing on Tuesday.
Lawyer Gib van Ert said the judge presiding over the case, and not Canada’s justice minister, must decide whether the US had jurisdiction to bring its fraud case against Meng.
“It’s not a matter that you may leave to someone else. It is a legal determination. It is a question you must answer,” lawyer Gib van Ert told Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, as he pressed the case that the US has no right to prosecute Meng under international law, and Holmes must therefore throw out the bid for her extradition to New York.
The case showed that the US had wrongfully “given itself the power to regulate the conduct of Chinese nationals in Hong Kong”, van Ert said.
Meng is accused by the US of defrauding HSBC by lying to one of its bankers in a 2013 meeting about Huawei’s business dealings in Iran, thus putting the bank at risk of breaching US sanctions. But the US has no right to prosecute Meng’s conduct, van Ert had said on Monday, because Meng is Chinese, HSBC is British and the meeting took place in a Hong Kong teahouse.