Updated
A Chinese court has sentenced a Canadian man to death for drug smuggling, a ruling sure to aggravate already sour relations between Beijing and Ottawa following the arrest of a senior Chinese executive in Canada.
Key points:
- Relations between the two nations are already strained over arrest of Huawei CEO
- Schellenberg had conspired to smuggle 222kg of methamphetamine from China to Australia
- Human rights organisations estimate China executions to be around 2,000 annually
The Dalian Intermediate People’s Court in China’s north-east province of Liaoning retried Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, who had appealed against his original 15-year sentence, and decided on execution, the court said in a statement on its website.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the decision.
“It is of extreme concern to us as a government, as it should be to all our international friends and allies, that China has chosen to begin to arbitrarily apply the death penalty … as in this case,” he told reporters in Ottawa.
Relations between the two nations are already strained in the wake of the December 1 arrest in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, at the request of the United States.
China denounced her arrest, warning of unspecified consequences unless she was released, and has since detained two Canadians on suspicion of endangering state security.
Death sentence condemned by rights groups
The court said Schellenberg had conspired with others in an attempt to smuggle 222 kilograms of methamphetamine from China to Australia in late 2014.
The drug syndicate had concealed 222 bags of the drug in plastic pellets when it shipped it from Guangdong to Dalian.
Then it planned to conceal it in tyres and tubing and ship it via container to Australia, according to the court.
The death sentence was quickly condemned by rights groups.
William Nee, a Hong Kong-based China researcher with Amnesty International, said it was horrified that Schellenberg had been sentenced to death, particularly as drug-related offences did not meet the threshold of the “most serious crimes” to which the death penalty must be restricted under international law.
“This is all the more shocking given the rushed nature of the retrial, and the deliberate way in which the Chinese authorities drew attention to this case,” Mr Nee said.
“China is going to face lots of questions about why this particular person, of this particular nationality, had to be retried at this particular time,” said Human Rights Watch’s Washington-based China director Sophie Richardson.
Drug smuggling is routinely punished severely in China. Beijing has previously executed foreign nationals convicted of drug-related crimes — a Briton caught smuggling heroin was executed in 2009, prompting a British outcry over what it said was the lack of any mental health assessment.
Beijing considers the number of people executed in China each year to be a state secret.
International human rights organisations estimate the figure at about 2,000.
AP/Reuters
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