A saga to do huawei case it’s over, and with it one of the main obstacles in relations between Washington and Ottawa, on the one hand, and Beijing, on the other. As the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Meng Wanzhou visits China after the United States drops the charges against her, Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor have also been released and are on a plane home to House.
“Twelve minutes ago, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor left Chinese airspace on their way home,” announced Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, without giving further details on the release of his two compatriots. It is “an operation in progress”, he underlined. Both will land in Canada this Saturday. “These two men went through a horrible ordeal for over a thousand days. They have shown determination, grace and endurance at all times and are an inspiration to all of us, ”said Trudeau.
The return of Meng, on the one hand, and the “two Michael’s,” as they were popularly called, on the other hand, ends nearly three years of behind-the-scenes negotiations between China, on the one hand, and the United States. United States and Canada, on the other hand, in a case that has deteriorated relations between the two sides to levels not seen in decades.
The case exploded on December 1, 2018, when Meng, daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, was arrested by Canadian authorities at the behest of the United States, while stopping over in Vancouver en route to Mexico. . The Washington Department of Justice accused her of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and demanded her extradition from Ottawa.
Beijing was furious at what it saw as a politicized attack on one of its top tech companies and a leader in 5G. Two days later, in retaliation, the two Canadians were arrested on suspicion of espionage. Kovrig, a former diplomat who, at the time of his arrest, worked for the conflict resolution NGO Crisis Group, was jailed in Beijing. Spavor, a businessman specializing in cultural exchanges with North Korea, was arrested at his home in Dandong, on the country’s border with China.
Spavor was sentenced in August to 11 years in prison for spying and transmitting state secrets to foreign forces. Kovrig was tried in March but was still awaiting sentencing.
Canada and the United States have always described the arrests of the two Canadians as “arbitrary”. Chinese diplomats have always said, until the very last moment, that the cases were unrelated to Meng’s detention, kept under house arrest in one of his mansions in Vancouver. On September 3, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing insisted that “the incident of Meng Wanzhou and the cases of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig are of a completely different nature. Isolated cases of Canadian citizens have been speculated and China has been falsely accused of arbitrary detention ”.
The Gordian knot was undone when the US Department of Justice struck a deal with Meng, whereby the executive was released in exchange for public recognition of the commission of minor offenses. The release of the CFO and the two Canadians represents an olive branch between Washington and Beijing. It perhaps opens the door to a certain restart of relations between the two rivals, after a general degradation of the links during the quartet of Donald Trump and which did not improve after the arrival of Joe Biden at the White House.
The deal and its swift ending was announced precisely on the day Biden held a summit at the White House with members of the Quad, the informal security association formed by the United States, Japan, Australia and the United States. India. And that Beijing sees as an alliance to limit its influence in the Indo-Pacific region. It also comes a week after the announcement of a defense pact between the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom that will include, among other things, the supply of nuclear submarines to Canberra. The deal, known as Aukus, will strengthen U.S. influence in the Asia-Pacific region and has come under heavy criticism from China, which sees it as yet another hostile act.
The pact between the United States Attorney General and Meng will be in effect until December 2022, and until then the United States can reactivate the judicial process, if deemed necessary. If on this date there is no termination of the contract, the file will be considered as definitively closed. Hours after the charges were dropped, Canadian judges officially ended the extradition process from the Chinese executive.
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