The two Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michale Spavor were detained by China in December 2018 and charged with spying last year. They were arrested just days after Meng Wanzhou a top financial executive of Chinese telecom company Huawei was detained in Vancouver at the US’s request. Canada slammed the move as “arbitrary” while China denied that the arrests of the two Canadian nationals took place in retaliation for Meng’s detention.
Meng Wanzhou (Getty Images)
The Free Michael Spavor website said Spavor was “behind bars, without his family and without access to lawyers”. “Michael is an earnest, genuine, and impossibly fun person, who we believe has been detained in error,” the site, updated last year, said.