The judge presiding over the Meng Wanzhou extradition case has asked Crown and defence lawyers to condense the hearing schedule further so that it can end before summer 2021.
Associate chief justice Heather Holmes said at a case management hearing for the Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. executive that the current options proposed by the Crown and defence would both have the hearings conclude by May 2021 or thereabouts. While Holmes said previously that she is concerned about the hearings running too long, she added today that she still prefers the schedule to be even more condensed than what was proposed this month.
Holmes also asked Meng’s lawyers to reconsider the order of the argument topics still to be considered in the extradition hearings. Currently, with double criminality already settled (with Holmes siding with the Crown on that decision), the next two topics of discussion are supposed to be first the sufficiency of the evidence provided by Canadian authorities on Meng’s arrest, then the abuse-of-process claim that the United States is seeking the Huawei executive’s extradition for political reasons.
The judge said she would prefer to hear the abuse-of-process branch first because it would then make clear to the court what records and information could be missing from the Attorney General’s Office and what the impact of that absence is to the case – which would then be dealt with in the sufficiency-of-evidence discussions.
Meng lawyer Richard Peck, however, pushed back hard against the idea. Peck argues the comments by U.S. President Donald Trump regarding the possibility of using Meng as a negotiation chip in trade discussions with China “outrageous comments” that require the court to examine the case in the original hearing schedule – which puts abuse-of-process last - as an issue of “fundamental fairness.”
Crown attorney Robert Frater suggested that prosecutors and defence lawyers need a few days to propose a new schedule to adhere by Holmes’ requests. That case management hearing has been scheduled for June 23.
