Meng Wanzhou's lawyers back in court, will try to prove she's a victim of conspiracy
Lawyers for Meng Wanzhou will appear in B.C. Supreme Court Monday in a bid for information they believe will establish that the Huawei executive was the victim of a conspiracy between U.S. and Canadian law agencies.
Meng, the chief financial officer of a global communications
giant, is required to attend the proceedings in person, but she will be
appearing by phone from her Vancouver home as her lawyers fight the Crown over
details of the case Canada's attorney general believes wants to keep hidden
from public view.
The fight may be over the technicalities of legal privilege
— the right to shield sensitive communications and documentation — but
observers of the case say the outcome could prove crucial in Meng's battle
against extradition to the United States.
"This disclosure of who said what to who is
critical," said Richard Kurland, a Vancouver immigration lawyer who has
followed the proceedings closely.
"The line here is how much information ought to be
revealed in order for the defence to know the case they have to meet and mount
their defence, counterbalanced against the right of the state to conduct
clandestine service. That's quite a difficult balance in a case like
this."
Wanted for fraud and conspiracy
The U.S. wants Meng sent to New York to faces charge of
fraud and conspiracy in relation to allegations she lied to an HSBC banker in Hong
in 2013 about Huawei's control of a company accused of violating American
economic sanctions against Iran.
Prosecutors claim that by relying on Meng's alleged lies to
continue working with Huawei, banks were in danger of breaching the same set of
sanctions, risking fines and prosecution.
Meng, 48, has denied the allegations. Her lawyers plan to
argue that the American Federal Bureau of Investigation conspired with the
Canada Border Services Agency, the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence
Service and others at the time of her arrest at Vancouver International Airport
on Dec. 1, 2018, to mount a "covert criminal investigation."
According to court documents, the Crown released about
"400 documents spanning between 1,200 and 1,500 pages" in February in
response to an order from Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes, the judge
overseeing the case.
The Crown wants to redact all or part of half those
documents, and has also come up with a list of other documents it believes
should be wholly withheld because of public interest immunity or privilege
attached to conversations between solicitors and their clients.
Holmes's initial order for the release of the documents in
question followed two weeks of hearings last December, during which the defence
was able to establish an "air of reality" to its claims that Meng's
rights were breached.
Her lawyers argued that instead of an initial plan that
would have seen the RCMP arrest her on a plane that had just arrived from Hong
Kong, as directed by the extradition warrant, they opted to wait for three
hours while CBSA officers detained Meng, questioned her without a lawyer, and
took her electronic devices.
The Crown later admitted handing the RCMP the passcodes for
Meng's phones by accident.
Alleged abuse of process
The defence has accused the RCMP of recording technical
information and serial numbers from her laptop, phones and tablet and passing
it to the FBI, in violation of Canada's Extradition Act.
The documents Meng's lawyers requested concerned
communications between various government agencies in Canada and the U.S. in
the days preceding and following her arrest, as well as plans pertaining to her
arrest and information sharing.
To some degree, this week's hearings are expected to be a
replay of proceedings held in federal court last month in which the Crown
sought to withhold information in CSIS documents based on national security
concerns.
A judge has yet to rule on those applications.
The first day of the privilege hearings in B.C. Supreme
Court is expected to happen in public. Dates set aside for the rest of the week
will likely occur behind closed doors.
The arguments around alleged collusion between agencies are
one of three lines of challenge the defence ultimately plans to make in a bid
to have the case tossed.
Meng's lawyers also claim she is being used as a political
pawn by U.S. President Donald Trump, and that the U.S. misrepresented crucial
facts of the case against her in the initial set of documents used to justify
her arrest for extradition.
Continuing impacts
Although the court has adopted a streamlined schedule,
Holmes is not likely to reach a conclusion on extradition until late next year.
The defence still has to leap through a series of legal hurdles before having
the chance to actually argue that Meng's rights were breached.
In May, Holmes handed the defence team a major setback by
finding that the case against Meng met the bar for so-called "double
criminality" — in that the offence she is accused of in the U.S. would
also be considered as fraud had it occurred in Canada.
In the meantime, the impacts of the case continue to
reverberate around the globe. Relationships between China and Canada have
deteriorated, with China targeting canola and meat imports and accusing two
Canadians of spying, entrepreneur Michael Spavor and former diplomat Michael
Kovrig.
Both men have been held in harsh conditions in Chinese
prisons since they were first detained within days of Meng's arrest.
Meng, meanwhile, has been living under a form of house
arrest since she was released on $10 million bail in December. She is required
to wear an ankle monitoring bracelet as part of the terms of her release and is
trailed around the clock by private security guards.
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