China: death penalty confirmed on appeal for Canadian convicted of drug trafficking

Published on : 08/10/2021 – 08:20

Already sentenced to the death penalty at first instance, in January 2019, the Canadian Robert Lloyd Schellenberg had his sentence confirmed on appeal, Tuesday, August 10, by a local court in China.

This rebound comes as the Chinese justice is due to announce, Wednesday, its verdict in another case against a Canadian national, the consultant Michael Spavor, suspected of espionage.

The arrest in China of the latter and of a third Canadian, the former diplomat Michael Kovrig, had ignited at the end of 2018 bilateral relations already degraded by the arrest a few days earlier in Canada, at the American request, of Meng Wanzhou , a senior official at Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.

Robert Lloyd Schellenberg was sentenced to death in January 2019. The court accused him of having smuggled, along with other defendants, more than 220 kilograms of methamphetamine.

Already convicted in the past in Canada of drug trafficking, the Canadian proclaimed his innocence and claimed to have gone to China for tourism. He had appealed against the conviction. The Higher People’s Court of Liaoning Province (northeast), the province where he was on trial, “decided to dismiss the appeal and uphold the initial verdict,” he said in a statement Tuesday.

Retaliation for the arrest of Meng Wanzhou?

“A plenary court was constituted” and “considered that the facts found at first instance were clear, the evidence reliable and sufficient” and that the death penalty was therefore “appropriate”, he said.

The appeal trial of Robert Lloyd Schellenberg took place in May 2019. It will therefore have taken more than two years for the Chinese justice to pronounce its verdict.

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It is announced as Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, is currently appearing in Canadian court for a final round of hearings devoted to her possible extradition to the United States.

Meng Wanzhou, 49, was arrested on December 1, 2018 at the Vancouver airport at the request of the Americans, who want to try her for bank fraud.

A few days after his arrest, China arrested two Canadians: ex-diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor. Arrests seen as a retaliatory measure by the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, which Beijing denies.

The two men were tried for “espionage” last spring during a closed-door trial.

With AFP