FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Hamilton, Ontario
July 28, 2021
STATEMENT BY THE CROSS-CANADA CAMPAIGN TO FREE MENG WANZHOU
Justice Holmes recently sided with the Crown and against Mme. Meng’s legal team to exclude 300 HSBC bank documents as evidence during the upcoming final round of extradition hearings, beginning on Tuesday, August 3, 2021. These documents prove Mme. Meng gave HSBC complete disclosure of transactions related to Iran and no fraud was committed. Huawei obtained the documents through a successful court proceeding in Hong Kong, China. Justice Holmes ruled that the documents would be more appropriately handled at a future date in a US court of law where Meng may be sent, depending on the outcome of the trial, to face several indictments for fraud, which could result in a possible cumulative sentence of more than 100 years in prison.
Naturally, we do NOT agree with the judge’s decision. The Cross-Canada Campaign to Free Meng Wanzhou takes the position that, in view of the evidence contained in the trove of 300 HSBC documents, Minister of Justice Lametti ought to use his discretionary power, as provided by s. 23 of the Extradition Act, to terminate Meng’s extradition today and release her immediately to return to China. After all, the minister and cabinet are well aware of the content of the new HSBC documents: the substance of this new evidence has been widely covered in the mainstream media around the globe.
As always, we maintain that the Trudeau government should never have collaborated with the Trump Administration to arrest Mme. Meng nearly three years ago. The very fact that Trump explicitly remarked, several days later, that he intended to hold Meng hostage and use her as a bargaining chip in his trade war with China, showed that the extradition request was political in nature and should therefore have invalidated the US request under Canada’s Extradition Act. Moreover, the US request to extradite Meng was based on the false premise of US extraterritoriality, that is to say, attempting to exert non-existent US jurisdiction over dealings between Huawei, a Chinese high-tech company; HSBC, a British bank; and Iran, a sovereign state, none of whose dealings (in this matter) took place in the USA. By requesting Meng’s extradition from Canada to the USA, Trump was also sending a signal to global political and business leaders that the US would continue to enforce its unilateral and illegal economic sanctions on Iran which were supposed to have been lifted under UN Security Council Resolution 2231 when the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal) came into effect on January 16, 2016. Finally, Trudeau shouldn’t have collaborated with Trump because of Trump’s malicious intent to cripple Huawei and to keep China permanently underdeveloped.
By releasing Meng today, Canada could show a measure of independence of foreign policy and begin to restore friendly political and economic relations with the People’s Republic of China, our second-largest trading partner, for the mutual benefit of the Canadian and Chinese peoples.
Please stay tuned for the next public event in the Cross-Canada Campaign to FREE MENG WANZHOU, which will take place in September 2021, following the presentation of closing arguments in the extradition hearings in the case of Ms. Meng.
For further information, please contact Ken Stone at 905-383-7693, 289-382-9008 or at kenstone@cogeco.ca.
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