Commentary
The holidays came early to Europe, with a gift for the rule of law and human rights protections offered not by some red-dressed, bearded man but rather by a court in Cyprus.
On Dec. 23, the court, which has been processing the first-ever extradition request from the Chinese regime since it ratified an extradition treaty, reached a verdict, which was very damning for China.
The Cypriot court is not the first court in Europe that has denied extraditions to China, of course, but the verdict itself, and the type of case it concerns, not only makes it precedent-setting in Cyprus, where China is already engaged in trying to have more people extradited, but likely to influence courts across the 46 countries across Europe bound by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)….