- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
- world@lemmy.world
China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as prime minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing.
…
Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived after the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou.
That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians – Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig – on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory.
Then in January 2019 a court in north-east China retried Schellenberg – who was 36 at the time – sentencing him to death while declaring that his 15-year prison term for drug trafficking had been too lenient.
…
The court said he had been a central player in a scheme to ship narcotics to Australia, in a one-day retrial that Amnesty International called “a flagrant violation of international law”.
Schellenberg has denied wrongdoing.
…
Coersion over, yaaay.
Yah go Fuck yourselves
I heard somewhere that there are a few tens of Canadians in Chinese jails. When I see bullshit like this, it makes me wonder if any of them actually committed a crime.
Honestly, I assume they all did…
But that doesn’t mean that I think they were meaningful crimes, much more likely boosting littering to a lifetime in jail
For those who wondered if China’s legal system was independent or a tool of the state.
Make a mental note.
The latest information I could find about it is from October 2024. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote back then,
No country except the US has more of its citizens detained in China than Canada.
As an addition: There is an interesting comment by Michael Kovrig from July 2025 when China Secretly Executed Four Canadians.