Meng Wanzhou Photo:AFP

She is a daughter of a 76-year-old man. She is a mother of four children. She is a citizen of China and the CFO of a Chinese company, Huawei. She has been illegally detained in Canada for 1,000 days. 

On December 1, 2018, Meng Wanzhou was arrested by Canadian authorities at the Vancouver airport at the behest of the previous Trump administration for the alleged crime of fraud by Huawei to breach US sanctions against Iran. Over the past 32 months, the world has witnessed a political puppet show orchestrated by the biggest bully on this planet, with its northern neighbor acting as a marionette.  

Meng, 49, has not violated any law under the Canadian jurisdiction, neither any international obligations incumbent upon Canada. The fraud charge against her is trumped-up, and politically motivated. There have been many loopholes in the judicial procedures ever since she was illegally questioned for more than three hours by Canadian border police at the Vancouver airport: contradictory testimony, prearranged documents used to bait and hook the victim, intentional misinformation, and so on. Too many abuses of process and none of the condition of qualifications for extraditions were met, as many Canadian legal experts openly observed. 

Behind the thinly veiled and spurious legal claims hid the true intentions of the manipulator pulling the strings. Former US president Donald Trump said in an interview with Reuters that he would "certainly intervene" in Meng's case if he thought it necessary to help the US reach a trade deal with China. His former secretary of state Mike Pompeo "honestly" admitted that his mission was to take down the "national security risk" of having Chinese telecom systems inside American networks. The capture of Meng offered the US a great opportunity to keep Huawei on a short leash. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon spoke from a more "strategical" perspective that for the US to rivalry against China, to strangle Huawei was "10 times more important than the trade deal." 

As such, it is quite clear that this is a brazen gambit by the US to coerce China and Huawei by taking Meng as a hostage.  

The Canadian Trudeau administration is willing to be the wheeler-dealer henchman in America's nefarious plot. Canada was the only one of the US' allies answering its call to arrest Meng. This suggests that other US allies at least have a little more sense on this sensitive matter. When Meng presented evidence to disprove the US government's accusations, and even HSBC agreed to provide documents to the court to help prove her innocence, Canada ignored it and pushed forward with extradition procedures. By pandering to America's calculations, Canada lost both its international reputation and its judicial integrity.

This is an egregious miscarriage of justice. Meng's detention has also torn off mask of hypocrisy of Washington and Ottawa, who may arbitrarily detain a foreign national as a political bargaining chip. They do not even bother to care that Meng's life has been "changed forever" by her unjustified arrest. She has been living under "onerous" bail conditions akin to a community jail term, far away from her family and motherland. The arbitrary detention and extended custody have severely violated Meng's legitimate rights as an innocent citizen.

As I am wiring this article, the Global Times has launched an online petition demanding Meng's immediate release. And more than 14 million people around the world have signed the petition. "The Canadian government has deviated from fairness and justice, and seriously violated the human rights of a Chinese citizen," the petition reads. 

It is not clear how much further Ottawa will deviate from fairness and justice, but Meng's case once again reveals that everything can be expendable for the sake of America's own political or geopolitical convenience, whether it is an opponent or an ally. Afghanistan's collapse is the latest wake-up call. Any country who conspires with the US had better give a second thought to whether "America First" means "your interests last."

The author is a commentator on international affairs, writing regularly for Global Times, CGTN, China Daily, and so on. He can be reached at xinping604@gmail.com