By Jerome A. Cohen
I have been trying to follow PRC justice for over sixty years but am genuinely puzzled by the brief report I have seen on today’s “trial”. After a closed hearing of merely two-hours in Dandong, the court released a statement saying that the judgment would be announced at a later date. What is the PRC up to? Do its leaders realize what a self-inflicted wound this amounts to?
After arbitrarily holding Spavor and Michael Kovrig incommunicado for over two years as diplomatic hostages, the PRC brings them to trial at precisely the time PRC and US leaders are meeting nearby amid world publicity, and the PRC is increasingly being accused of crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang and the violation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong. Nevertheless, the PRC conducts the Spavor trial in circumstances that are sure to subject the PRC to ridicule by all democratic nations.
A two-hour trial with important international implications conducted in a total news blackout? No foreign journalists, diplomats or other outsiders permitted to watch? The Canadian consul excluded from the hearing in violation of the PRC-Canada Consular Agreement? Were there defense lawyers? An indictment? Witnesses? For the defense? Did Spavor have an interpreter? An opportunity to speak? To question witnesses? How did he plead? What is his mental and physical condition after his long pre-trial ordeal? When will the verdict be announced and the sentence? Does this depend on the outcome of the endless Canadian extradition case? Will the accused be allowed to appeal or possibly encouraged to do so in order to extend the proceedings until the extradition of Ms. Meng is decided?
Is the handling of this case designed to demonstrate that China has stood up to the world judicially in a blatant exercise of a newly empowered “sovereignty” that rejects conventional contemporary standards? What can its leaders be thinking? Are we back to the days of Chinese-Western conflicts over Imperial China’s criminal prosecutions of Western sailors at the end of the 18th century and early 19th century?