Canada should end extradition travesty

The start of the hearing in a Vancouver courtroom on Monday to decide whether Huawei's Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou will be extradited to the United States has only served to prove how politically motivated the case is.

The US alleges Meng violated US sanctions against Teheran. But since Canada did not have sanctions against Iran at the time Canadian officials authorized commencement of the extradition in December 2018 by detaining Meng while she was transiting at Vancouver airport, Canada had no legal grounds to put a Chinese citizen under arrest simply because the US demanded it do so.

Let alone the fact that neither Chinese citizens, nor Chinese companies, are obliged to abide by Washington's unilateral sanctions on Teheran, which lack the authorization of the United Nations, and are devoid of international legal binding force.

As China's Foreign Ministry spokesman said, the US and Canada abused their bilateral extradition treaty to arbitrarily take compulsory measures against a Chinese citizen without cause.

Canada as a sovereign state had no legal obligation to act as the US' pawn to carry out the latter's long-arm jurisdiction. That it impulsively did the US' bidding unavoidably implicated Canada in the then high tide of the trade row between the world's two largest economies.

Although the US president claimed that he might intervene in Meng's case if it helped secure a trade deal with China－clearly exposing the political nature of the case－Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's wishful appeal to his US counterpart to include the release of two Canadians detained by China on suspicion of endangering national security in the latter's trade talks with China has revealed the bitter fact that his government has been hung out to dry by the US, which expects its northern neighbor to do its bidding without reward.

The signing of the phase one deal earlier this month between China and the US should have awakened Canada to its passive role in this unsavory episode, and the shrinking value to the US of its loyalty in the Meng case.

What with appeals, it could take years for the final decision to be made on whether Meng is to be extradited or not. Yet Canada retains the power to act on its own volition and immediately put an end to the shenanigans of the US, by sending Meng home.

In other words, Canada, which has considered itself a victim of the geopolitical and economic competition between the US and China, has always held the initiative to free itself from its self-made dilemma, and also help to ease all three pairs of bilateral relations among the three.

It should do the right thing and exercise that initiative.