Opinion | Meng Wanzhou’s case, Beijing’s response and two legal scandals highlight the ‘rule of law’, as preached – and practised – in Canada and China

Amid the diplomatic row over the Huawei executive’s arrest and the two detained Canadians, Beijing and Ottawa are also being watched carefully around the world after strikingly different reactions to domestic law-related scandals

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in December 2017. Since the arrest of Huawei’s CFO in Canada, followed by the detention of two Canadians accused of espionage, Trudeau has criticised the “arbitrary” nature of Chinese justice and China’s ambassador has responded, accusing Canada of a “double standard” and “Western egoism”. Photo: The Canadian Press via AP

Published: 1:00am, 12 Mar 2019Updated: 5:55am, 25 Dec 2021

Canada has finally begun its judicial processing of the US request to extradite on fraud charges Meng Wanzhou, the prominent Huawei executive arrested last December.

In response, China’s Communist Party Political-Legal Commission announced that the government would prosecute two Canadian citizens – researcher and former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, whom state security police detained a few days after Meng’s detention – for “stealing and probing state secrets and intelligence”.

This vague but very serious accusation recently provoked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to comment: “We are a country of the rule of law. We will ensure that rule of law is fully respected, and we will go through those processes in a proper and rigorous way. It is unfortunate that China continues to move forward on these arbitrary detentions.”

Kovrig and Spavor’s nightmare has become the dream of scholars of comparative law. Here is an opportunity to demonstrate before the entire world the open and dramatic clash not only between two opposing ideologies about the meaning of the “rule of law” but also between the different practical consequences for human dignity and freedom of these clashing views.

China and Canada each claim to be a country ruled by law, but Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has instructed his country “to take the path of the rule of law that suits us, and ... not copy other countries’ models and practices. We must never follow the path of Western ‘constitutionalism’, ‘separation of powers’, and ‘judicial independence’.”