Can somebody explain to me on what authority the US can request the arrest of a Chinese national on Canadian soil for any action they took while conducting operations of a Chinese organization headquartered in China?
Regean had sovereign immunity, so he could not be personally tried.
That is a strange closed loop.
And for the sake of humanity let's hope the US is never beholden to Chinese whims.
2. Canada has similar embargo laws on the books.
3. Canada has a multi-lateral extradition treaty with the US
4. The crime is considered serious with a maximum penalty (in the US) of up to 20 years in prison plus substantial monetary fines.
So she's accused of a serious crime in the US that's also recognized as a crime in Canada, and the countries have an extradition treaty.
If I’m wholesaling Cisco routers and they show up in Syria or Iran, and Cisco and I can prove we didn’t know how they got there , that still doesn’t make it okay.
If HP (A US company) sells to a middleman without knowing who the final customer is for embargoed goods then HP and its executives can be held legally responsible.
This is mostly based on mandatory training I had to go through while working for a US company. I am not a lawyer ;)
If embargoes were trivial to get around they'd be pointless. The intent of embargo laws are to as much as possible, within the full power of the US, prevent goods from getting to a certain country regardless of any other variable. Embargoes are pretty extreme actions, there are only a few targets for those in general and the embargo usually targets specific goods.
However, it may not be salient. It's allegedly HP computer equipment - https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-huawei-skycom/exclusive-h...
This is surely about hardware.
Canada arrested him, not the US.
If you mean, what is the authority for the US to ask Canada to do that, well, asking doesn't require any special authority; OTOH, the US does have an extradition treaty with Canada [0], and while trade sanctions violations don't appear to be an enumerated offense covered by the extradition treaty, sanctions violations tend to also involve false declarations and certain kinds of frauds, which are covered.
[0] https://www.oas.org/juridico/mla/en/traites/en_traites-ext-c...
What "authority" do you need to ask for a favor from a friendly ally? Canada also has active economic sanctions against Iran.
Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
I'm sure you forgot. We all make mistakes.
For example, this article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18476805
...is just dominated by people that didn't read to the end. The top complaint is treating the article as if it isn't facetious (it is.)
That does get very frustrating. I understand the premise of the rule, though.
Sarcasm is annoying, and prone to misinterpretation. That's not the fault of the reader who took the author at face value.
I think the more important question is: if someone is talking out of their ass, is it worth continuing to talk to them? In RL, other factors may apply, but in a forum like this...?
Unless ofc you end up with an interesting response anyways ;) (note: did you read tfa does not constitute interesting unless your standards are disturbingly low). Imo the minimum is a good backhanded insult thrown in
What if the us origin component was a plastic bezel, a screw or some peice of sheet metal in the chassis...
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-huawei-skycom/exclusive-h...
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
You will also note that the poster of the question never came back to acknowledge the work people put into replying and explaining the situation. I believe that eduction wasn't the intent here.
Regarding "coming back", the poster may be in a different time zone or have an abnormal work / life schedule
Your explanation is flawed because it’s derived from how you think of the speaker with no good faith.
The crackdown on online poker was a striking example of this. To give cliff notes the US, heavily influenced by casino lobbyists, decided to ban online poker. Online poker sites were operating in foreign countries obeying all laws domestically applied to them. In spite of the fact that sites were operating within all laws that domestically applied to them, the US decided to act because they refused to overtly ban US players. In an extremely rapid action the US simultaneously confiscated the domains of these sites, and executed arrest warrants on many of the involved individuals including surreptitious raids and extraditions from places including South/Central America, and froze numerous bank accounts around the world including in places such as Ireland.
The US is powerful enough that its own desire is sufficient authority to enact any action. Guantanamo Bay is a great example. This is not a just a US property under US law. It is operated as a US territory but mostly independent of US legal authority. The Geneva Convention is disregarded as convenient. For instance the three prisoners that were reported as having committed suicide (which would result in condemnation in Islamic belief) were allegedly tortured to death at a secret facility in Guantanamo, known as 'Camp No' (as in, no it does not exist), detached from the main camp. [1]
I'm not saying that Huawei is innocent, I just agree with the downvoted comment that the situation seems ridiculous.
For instance, Thailand sought extradition of those insulting their king abroad.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/29/thailand-bhumi...
They all have long prison sentences/death in their country, and light/no sentences in most of the rest of the world.
All countries have tried to go after people breaking their culturally sensitive thing abroad, with varying levels of success.
That doesn't make them morally equivalent. You can't defend 30 years in prison for being mean.
This sense of moral superiority or having a better judgement than others, is exactly the property that blinds individuals and entire cultures to the absurdity of their own morals.
Almost every culture at almost every point in history prevalently believes they have morals figured out and anything that came before them or from elsewhere is absurd.
In Thailand a lot of people jailed for Lèse-majesté get pardoned by the king. This king is new though so that might not continue.
This is why a number of VW corporate officers cannot travel to countries with extradition treaties with the US, due to diesel cheating scandal.
In most countries laws are created faster than citizens can learn them even if they would put a lot of effort into that. In many cases those who vote them haven't even read them in detail. There is no single person on the planet who knows all laws in all countries. Should we abandon the idea of the Internet?
It would be purely hypothetical pondering if not for GDPR which bring a lot of mess to countries outside EU and cut off some EU users from the content which they could otherwise consume.
Unless regulators get their stuff together reasonably quick, we may likely end up in some more encrypted and decentralized version of the Internet which makes governments less relevant. I don't mind.
I highly doubt that Huawei executives were unaware that this was against US policy and law; they just thought that the US would only punish the corporation and not the people involved, without realizing that the arm of US law extends to a whole web of countries that have extradition treaties with it.
See also the German VW executives who are very restricted in where they can travel to based on their crimes in the diesel emissions scandal.
The unusual thing is that the Canada-US extradition treaty allows extradition on such a "political" offense, but that's probably mostly down to the US and Canada having the same position on Iran.
Whenever you get in the cross-hairs of any country and you travel abroad, there is a non-zero risk of you being extradited.
If you're outside America, you don't have a right not to be blown to pieces by a killer robot (aka "drone"). Why would you think that? They can blow you to pieces for any reason at any time no matter where you are.
That's a given, mate. The commentor made the ridiculous claim that he had a right not to be arrested in China for breaking Chinese laws. No individual has that right.
The passage I responded to was
> How sure can I be if my company is not breaking any Chinese laws? Would it by fine if I get arrested for breaking those when I'm on a trip to Asia?
The answer is that you cannot be sure. The chinese government has every ability to arrest you for crimes committed elsewhere. They have every ability to change their laws at any time to enable their arrest. No one will even blink if they abandoned their legal system entirely to arrest just you for nothing at all in particular. There is no 'rule' saying they can only arrest you for things done on their soil; or that arrests of a non-citizen must be just; or really anything.
This is true of America as well. Why wouldn't it be? We're speaking on the level of sovereign nations.
> If you're outside America, you don't have a right not to be blown to pieces by a killer robot (aka "drone"). Why would you think that? They can blow you to pieces for any reason at any time no matter where you are.
This is another topic entirely and completely non-germaine to the thread.
Countries with "incompatible" legal systems generally don't have extradition treaties, but if they do you typically have to be charged with something that's a serious crime in both countries.
To the second aspect of your question, Canada is under treaty obligation to cooperate with extradition requests issued by US courts for fugitive apprehension, and Canadian courts will rule on whether the extradition is consistent with Canadian law before transferring the suspect to US federal custody.
Welcome to the rule of law.
What she is alleged to have done would be a crime in Canada too so her nationality isn’t relevant.
That's not a fair comparison. If any law was broken, it was definitely not broken on US soil. It would be like US arresting people that it thinks committed murders in China.
> What she is alleged to have done would be a crime in Canada too so her nationality isn’t relevant.
I think it is. It's also relevant where the crime occured. e.g., lets say some small country decides that it's illegal to wear grey color pants. Then, can they morally arrest any person anywhere in the world that they think wore grey color pants at any point in the time at any place in the world?
It seems the only allegations are against Huawei, of which sh is just one of many board members, and there's a good chance she wasn't even involved with the deal the allegation is concerning.
https://www.oas.org/juridico/mla/en/traites/en_traites-ext-c...
IE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Border_Declaration
There's all sorts of similar agreements/declarations/etc. We have a rather fluid border for the arrest and extradition of individuals.
The US calling Canada on the phone and asking them to arrest someone they want seems too.. easy? I imagine there's a limit where goodwill only gets you so far, and then some sort of compensation is expected. Maybe there's a lot of backdoor Gov2Gov money funneling or economic deals, but idk. This seems like stuff that is opaque to average citizens.
> All extradition treaties currently in force require foreign requests for extradition to be submitted through diplomatic channels, usually from the country's embassy in Washington to the Department of State. Many treaties also require that requests for provisional arrest be submitted through diplomatic channels, although some permit provisional arrest requests to be sent directly to the Department of Justice. The Department of State reviews foreign extradition demands to identify any potential foreign policy problems and to ensure that there is a treaty in force between the United States and the country making the request, that the crime or crimes are extraditable offenses, and that the supporting documents are properly certified in accordance with 18 U.S.C. § 3190. If the request is in proper order, an attorney in the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser prepares a certificate attesting to the existence of the treaty, etc., and forwards it with the original request to the Office of International Affairs.
For the Canadian version, see https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/emla-eej/tocan-aucan.htm...:
"""
There are three key stages to the Canadian extradition process:
The Minister of Justice must determine whether to authorize the commencement of extradition proceedings in the Canadian courts by issuing an “Authority to Proceed” ; Where an Authority to Proceed has been issued, the Canadian courts must determine whether there is sufficient evidence to justify the person’s committal for extradition; and Where the person is committed for extradition, the Minister of Justice must personally decide whether to order the person’s surrender to the foreign state. A person sought for extradition may appeal their committal and seek judicial review of the Minister’s surrender order.
In all cases, the conduct for which extradition is sought must be considered criminal in both the requesting country and in Canada. This is known as “dual criminality”.
Central Authorities from outside Canada are encouraged to contact the IAG to determine what is required to make an extradition request to Canada, including the evidentiary requirements, and whether provisional arrest is appropriate in a given situation.
"""
Some times the US later finds out that the arresting country’s courts found no authority or legality for their own country to arrest the person and wont continue with extradition. This happened in New Zealand.
So typically a bit more research is needed and they find a way to get it right in future cases.
Another thing the US does is send an FBI agent to merely observe the arrest, to ensure that it is later compatible with US courts as well. Its a lot of organizations to make happy but the US is essentially one of the only organizations with the resources and interest to bother.
It is an interesting outcome of the nation state concept.
Canada: 5'4 @110 lb kid in glasses with a pocket protector. Very smart. Has adoring crowd that claps.
US: the 6'1 220lb line backer built in the same school yard
Arrested Chinese exec: 4'10, 78lb daughter of a family from a different school somewhere over there. That school has lots of those like the US, US sometimes exchanges words with that school but they are somewhere over there.
Girls shows up in a schoolyard with Canada and the US. US tells Canada: "Give her to me. I have some business with her".