Canadian Schellenberg ‘definitely’ won’t face death again at China retrial: Lawyer

The head of the law firm representing Canadian Robert Lloyd Schellenberg says their client “definitely” won’t face the death penalty again after China’s top court overturned the sentence and announced his retrial on drug charges.

Mo Shaoping confirms in an interview that the British Columbia native’s 2019 drug smuggling conviction has been overturned by the Supreme People’s Court, and the case has now been sent back to the Liaoning Higher People’s Court for retrial.

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He says the Liaoning court will appoint three new judges to review the case, and the death penalty “will definitely not be imposed again.”

Mo says that although the date of the retrial hasn’t been set yet, he expects the proceeding to take about three months.

He says that when his colleague Zhang Dongshuo met Schellenberg on Friday to tell him that he had been granted a retrial, it appeared that Schellenberg’s mental stress had been “significantly relieved.”

Mo, who is one of China’s most prominent human rights lawyers, says Zhang also met representatives of the Canadian Embassy after the decision, adding that embassy staff continue to visit Schellenberg every month.

Mo says in an interview on Sunday that in accordance with Chinese law, any death sentence must be submitted to the Supreme People’s Court for approval.

He says in Schellenberg’s case, the death sentence review lasted four and a half years, before the Supreme People’s Court in China struck down the lower court’s sentence on Feb. 6, in a ruling first reported by the New York Times.

The decision came on the heels of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to Beijing, the first by a Canadian leader in eight years.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 9, 2026.