A defence team of lawyers for Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, has won a major court battle after Canada's attorney general was requested to release documents on her arrest, a court ruling said on Tuesday.
Heather Holmes, associate chief justice at the Supreme Court of British Columbia, agreed that there was an "air of reality" to Huawei Technologies Co Ltd's defence team, Reuters reported.
Evidence submitted by Canada's attorney general held "notable gaps", namely examples from the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) who made what is described as the "simple error of turning over to the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] contrary to law, the passcodes CBSA officers had required Ms Meng to produce”, the ruling said.
— Huawei Canada (@Huawei_Canada) December 10, 2019
The attorney general also failed to provide adequate evidence to "rebut inferences from other evidence that the RCMP improperly sent serial numbers and other identifiers of Ms Meng’s devices to the FBI”.
Such gaps in the submitted evidence raised queries "beyond the frivolous or speculative about the chain of events," leading her to conclude that Ms Meng's application “crosses the air of reality threshold", the ruling said.
But the ruling was limited and did not address whether Canadian authorities had mishandled identifying information from Meng Wanzhou's electronic devices, Heather Holms said in the document.
Requests to extradite Meng to the United States were "politically motivated", who had been unlawfully detained and questioned by Canadian authorities at Vancouver Internaitonal Airport on 1 December 2018, at the request of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, her defence team said.
Authorities charged the Huawei business executive with misleading HSBC on the firm's transactions with Iran, allegedly violating US sanctions, which the defendant has repeatedly and strongly denied whilst fighting her extradition to the US.
— Senator Chris Coons (@ChrisCoons) December 10, 2019
Both Huawei and the Canadian federal justice ministry have not provided official statements, and no timeline for Judge Holmes' ruling has been provided. Meng Wanzhou's extradition is set to take place on 20 January of next year at a Vancouver federal court.
The latest developments come amid the US trade war against China, where US president Donald Trump toughened his stance on Huawei in November and sought ways to allow US authorities to block foreign firms from from selling products using US technologies.
The Trump administration placed the Chinese tech giant on an entities list in May, blocking Huawei, ZTE and over 70 Chinese tech firms from doing business with companies in the US, in addition to insisting that Canadian authorities block Huawei from building the country's 5G infrastructure or risk losing access to US intelligence sharing. Whilst the US government repeatedly accuses Huawei of spying for the Chinese government, Beijing and Huawei officials have repeatedly denounced the claims.
Despite US actions against Huawei and regarding the arrest of his daughter, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei said in an interview in early November: “I haven’t stopped loving America because America attacked me.
