Everyone’s talking about how legality took a beating in the patently political Meng Wanzhou case, but it’s actually likely that, in fact, none of three countries obviously violated their own basic procedural legality: American prosecutorial discretion easily allows for…
… deals of this sort, the Canadian system didn’t engage in any legal irregularities whatsoever, whereas the Chinese court system did at least sentence the two Michaels to years in jail *plus* deportation, and can therefore claim that prioritizing the latter sentence…
… over the former is legally allowable. What the case shows, therefore, is not that procedural legality was discarded in favor or naked politics, but that naked politics can operate through procedural legality: legal systems are designed to allow and even facilitate politics…
… and any claim that “the legal” and “the political” are two ideally separate spheres is not merely naive, but fundamentally incoherent as a matter of logic.
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