theBreaker.news Podcast: A year in Lotusland for Meng, a year in Chinese jail for the two Canadian Michaels

A year ago this week, Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou was freed on $10 million bail so that she could live at one of her two luxurious Vancouver homes while challenging the United States' application to extradite her to face fraud charges.

[caption id="attachment_7962" align="alignright" width="301"] Louis Huang protested outside Meng Wanzhou's March 6 court date (Mackin)[/caption]

Across the Pacific, during the same week in 2018, Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were arrested by Chinese police in apparent retaliation. 

On Dec. 10, world human rights day, they will be on the minds of Peter Dahlin and millions of others. Dahlin is a human rights activist with the Safeguard Defenders non-government organization. Dahlin spent more than three weeks in a Chinese jail in 2016. 

“We still don’t really know how Kovrig and Spavor have been treated, all we know is that they’ve obviously been placed under formal arrest now since about six months and we’ve seen very little movement from the Chinese side," Dahlin told theBreaker.news Podcast host Bob Mackin. "Their cases are no closer to being resolved and that of course points very clearly to this being very much a political process and I don’t see any changes to their legal status for the foreseeable future.”

As 2019 draws to a close with Hong Kong's pro-democracy struggle and the Xinjiang jailing of a million Uighur Muslims in the news, the two-year countdown to the Beijing Winter Olympics beckons in 2020.

[caption id="attachment_7742" align="alignleft" width="398"] Swedish human rights activist Peter Dahlin in a 2016 forced, false confession (CCTV)[/caption]

“The IOC, in general, have been very resistant to any changes to their plans going back all the way to the [Berlin] 1936 Olympics and I don’t think we're going to see a change to that, unfortunately," Dahlin said. "But, of course, it is going to bring further spotlight to human rights issues, rule of law and how China behaves diplomatically internationally."

Listen to the full interview with Dahlin.

Plus commentaries and headlines from the Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest. 

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