Meng Wanzhou’s extradition judge should not decide on US jurisdiction, Canadian government lawyer says

The judge in Meng Wanzhou’s extradition case has been told by Canadian government lawyers that she has no business ruling whether the United States has jurisdiction to bring its fraud charges against the Huawei Technologies executive, and that the issue should be left to Canada’s justice minister and an American trial.

Meng’s lawyers had spent more than three days and filed seven expert reports by law professors and others to argue their case in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, that the US has no standing to bring the charges, that it was acting contrary to international law and that Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes should therefore stay the extradition hearing and release Meng.

But in his reply on Thursday, the Canadian Department of Justice’s top lawyer, Robert Frater, representing US interests in the case, told the judge that jurisdiction was “not a matter for you at all”.

He said that Meng’s lawyers’ “eloquently presented” argument was made up of “flaws that run so wide and so deep that I scarcely know where to begin”, namely that Canada’s extradition legislation and Supreme Court of Canada rulings had established jurisdiction as a consideration for the executive branch of government and foreign courts, not a Canadian extradition judge.

“[Questions] concerning a requesting state’s jurisdiction to prosecute are primarily for the foreign trial court; to the limited extent that they may be raised here, they are for the Minister of Justice at the surrender phase of the proceedings,” Frater and colleagues said in a written submission.

“The weight of jurisprudence … clearly directs that this issue is expressly not for the committal judge,” the submission concluded.