By Canadian Press

‘No need’ for lengthy border exam of Meng Wanzhou before her arrest: defence

Sep 25, 2019 | 12:52 PM

VANCOUVER — The defence team for a Huawei executive whose arrest at Vancouver’s airport sparked a diplomatic crisis between Canada and China says there was no good reason for border officials to detain her for almost three hours before her arrest. 

Scott Fenton, a defence lawyer for Meng Wanzhou, told the B.C. Supreme Court that border officials already knew that Meng was facing charges in the United States by the time she got off her flight from Hong Kong.

He says that means officials also knew she would be arrested and taken before the courts, that they had no power to remove her and that they could already report her as inadmissible because of the allegations she faces in the U.S. 

Instead, Fenton says she was held for three hours and a border official questioned her about her business in Iran before she was informed of her arrest and read her rights.

Meng was arrested Dec. 1, 2018, at the request of the United States, which is seeking her extradition on fraud charges in violation of sanctions with Iran.

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Both Meng and Chinese tech giant Huawei have denied any wrongdoing and none of the allegations have been tested in court.

Fenton says border official recorded that passwords to her phones and relayed them to RCMP along with her electronic devices as evidence that her detention was not a routine border check but a “covert criminal investigation.”

He argues the provisional arrest warrant calling for her “immediate” arrest should have taken precedence over an immigration examination.

“There was no need for this lengthy examination of the applicant,” he told the court.

Meng, who is the chief financial officer of Huawei and the daughter of the company’s founder, is free on bail and living in Vancouver.

Meng’s legal team is asking the court to further documentation to support its argument that her arrest at Vancouver’s airport was unlawful ahead of her extradition trial, which is scheduled to begin in January.

Canada’s attorney general has not yet presented its response in court, but documents show it will say officials followed the law when they detained Meng and the defence has no proof to substantiate its “conspiracy theory” that she was illegally arrested.

This report from The Canadian Press was first published on Sept. 25, 2019.

The Canadian Press