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Not content with taking Canadians hostage, China is now threatening to kill them.

It took nearly four years from his December 2014 arrest for the Chinese legal system to convict and sentence Robert Schellenberg for drug trafficking. Since the Dec. 1 arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of the Chinese technology giant Huawei, things have moved a little quicker.

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It took just 20 minutes last month for a Chinese court, in response to Schellenberg’s appeal of his 15-year sentence, to instead order, at the insistence of prosecutors, that he be retried. The retrial itself took all of a day Monday, followed within an hour by both verdict and sentence: death.

The suspicion that something other than the finer points of Chinese law might be at work in the sudden escalation of a 15-year sentence into the death penalty — that this was in fact the latest step in China’s furious efforts to blackmail Canada into releasing Meng — is not restricted to excitable newspaper columnists. It is the opinion of virtually every human rights organization and independent expert on the Chinese legal system.