"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's lawyer Zhang Dongshuo, reached in Beijing on Saturday, confirmed the decision was announced on Friday by China's highest court. 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,"
China's supreme people's court overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Lloyd Schellenberg and ordered a retrial by the Liaoning High People's Court. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 and was retried in January 2019, when a court sentenced him to death after declaring his prior 15-year term too lenient. The 2019 retrial followed the 2018 arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou and the detention of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig on espionage charges. Amnesty International called the one-day retrial a flagrant violation of international law. Schellenberg has denied wrongdoing; the timing of the new retrial has not been set.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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