Application and Improvement of Blocking Statute in the View of the Intersection of Public International Law and Private International Law: Review of the Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou Incident

Abstract

Blocking Statute, usually, refers to the legislative measures taken by a country to resist the extraterritorial application of a domestic law of another country, aiming to prevent and confront such foreign law within its own jurisdiction. On the one hand, as one of the national political tools to express attitudes, it has always been more symbolic than practical in significance. On the other hand, in recent years, sanctions and anti-sanctions have been frequent, and there must be laws to rely on. Laws on sanctions and anti-sanctions would push private subjects into a “dilemma” in fulfillment of their legal obligations, and the private subjects are forced to be in a dilemma of national interests. This paper, in the view of the intersection of public international law and private international law and from a political and legal perspective, proposes that the imperfections in the application of Blocking Statute itself exacerbate the negative impact of jurisdictional conflicts caused by extraterritorial jurisdiction on private subjects. When a private subject in involved in an inter-state conflict, it can only be resolved by one of the conflicting countries renouncing its jurisdictional claims and accepting non-compliance with its regulations by the other party. This paper holds that Blocking Statute alone cannot confront the doubts about foreign extraterritorial jurisdiction, and that the solution lies in the international cooperation at the level of public international law and the full operation through judicial procedures and the enforcement of Blocking Statute in private international law.