On the front page of Canada’s main English-language newspaper, The Globe and Mail, Monday March 22, the photo of the number two of the Canadian embassy in China, Jim Nickel, surrounded in front of the Beijing court by more than twenty foreign diplomats, in particular American, French, German or even British. All held outside the courtroom where the trial of Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat imprisoned in China for two years and three months for “espionage” was taking place behind closed doors. At midday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed his gratitude to them for having “Demonstrated the solidarity of free democracies around the world with Canada”.
Conversely, the Chinese authorities have expressed their dissatisfaction with this manifestation of international support. ” That a few dozen diplomats try to meet to exert pressure, that constitutes an interference in the judicial sovereignty of China ”, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying immediately protested.
Sino-Canadian relations deteriorated
The verdict of Michael Kovrig’s trial as well as that of his compatriot, businessman Michael Spavor, tried three days earlier under the same conditions in Dandong (northeast China), will be delivered ” at a later date “. Ottawa has not stopped, since the arrest of its two nationals in December 2018, a few days after Huawei’s number two, Meng Wanzhou, was herself arrested in Vancouver at the request of the American justice, which accuses him of circumventing US sanctions against Iran, to demand their “Immediate release”. Friday, Justin Trudeau denounced again “Their totally unacceptable arbitrary detention, as well as the lack of transparency surrounding these legal proceedings”.
But the trials of the two “Michael” come against a backdrop of stiffening relations between Beijing and its Western partners, which augurs well for a difficult “amicable” settlement of this case which has poisoned Sino-Canadian relations for more than two years. years. That of Michael Spavor had opened the same day of the first summit, tense, held in Alaska between the American and Chinese foreign ministers. A few hours after the opening of that of Michael Kovrig, Canada followed suit with the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions against four Chinese leaders because of ” their participation in gross and systematic human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region ”, according to a press release from Global Affairs Canada (Department of Foreign Affairs).
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