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After more than two years, Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou’s U.S. extradition hearing entered the final weeks.
Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou returned to the Canadian court on Wednesday to participate in the final weeks of her extradition hearing in the United States, as the two-year legal proceedings are coming to an end.
Meng, 49, was arrested at Vancouver International Airport in December 2018 under a U.S. arrest warrant, accusing her of misleading HSBC Holdings plc in Huawei’s business transactions in Iran, which may cause the bank to violate U.S. economic sanctions.
Meng said she was innocent and had been fighting her extradition case while under house arrest in Vancouver.
The upcoming hearing is expected to last until August 20, and will initially focus on the third part of her lawyer’s argument, especially the US prosecutor’s extradition request to Canada that seriously misrepresented the case against her.
The defense claimed that the U.S. case record was “obviously unreliable,” and Canadian prosecutors disputed this.
The hearing will then enter the remedial phase, which will resolve Meng’s allegations of abusing procedures during her arrest. Later, a criminal hearing will be held to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to prevent Ms. Meng from appearing in court.
People are generally expected to make a decision in September or the following months.
A spokesperson for the Canadian Department of Justice said on Tuesday that according to Canadian law, Meng will continue to receive fair procedures.
Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the days after Meng’s arrest, the relationship between Ottawa and Beijing was immediately neglected, and China detained two Canadians-businessman Michael Spavor and former diplomat Michael Cummingkai. Ottawa has repeatedly pressured Washington to help pressure China to release these people.
Lynette Ong, an associate professor at the University of Toronto and an expert on China issues, said that since Joe Biden became President of the United States in January this year, the context of the case “has undergone significant changes.”
Ong said that Biden’s return to a more traditional diplomatic model means that Canada can rely on the United States to defend the two Canadians in a way that former US President Donald Trump could not.
“In the Biden era, friends had to care about each other’s interests, which was not the case in the Trump era-it was a unilateral aggressive approach to a large extent,” Wang said.
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