Court will hear appeal on Khadr

The hypocrisy of the Harper government is open for all to see here. Imagine the Canadian govt. The govt. will not ask the US to return Khadr to Canada and it claims that it expects Khadr will get due process in Guantanamo a positively ludicrous idea given the nature of the military tribunals. It never said boo to the fact that its own citizen was imprisoned for years while still a juvenile in Guantanamo. It is easy to greet the Dalai Lama and give honorary citizenship to a Burmese dissident than to complain about the violation of basic rights of a Canadian citizen by its master the US of A. This contradiction goes unremarked since Khadr is an accused terrorist. Only the good guys(and gals) deserve human rights apparently.


Court will hear appeal on Khadr

Crown wants top court to decide whether it's obliged to give file to prisoner's lawyers

Oct 26, 2007 04:30 AM
Tonda MacCharles
Ottawa Bureau

OTTAWA – The Supreme Court of Canada will decide whether the federal government should be forced to turn over its complete file on Canadian Omar Khadr to his lawyers.

Yesterday, the high court granted the Canadian government leave to appeal a lower court decision ordering potential disclosure of thousands of pages of documents.

The government wants most of the documents kept secret for national security reasons.

But if the top court doesn't move swiftly to hear and rule on the case, it won't matter for Khadr, said one of his Canadian lawyers, Nate Whitling.

That's because Khadr is due to reappear Nov. 8 before a U.S. military commission, which is trying him on five charges, including murder in the July 2002 death of a U.S. special forces medic.

"It is a setback," said Whitling, of the further delay in releasing the documents. He has argued the documents were key to a fair trial for the 21-year-old man, held in Guantanamo Bay. Now, Khadr's legal team is putting together a motion to expedite the hearing.

The Toronto-born Khadr was taken prisoner by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15. He was later sent to a U.S. military detention facility in Guantanamo, Cuba, where he has been held since October 2002.

As is custom, the Supreme Court of Canada did not release reasons for agreeing to hear the appeal. The judges usually only hear matters that are deemed of national interest. No date has been set for the appeal.

Agents for CSIS and Foreign Affairs interviewed Khadr in 2003 in Guantanamo Bay. Canada turned over summaries of its notes to American investigators.

But only heavily censored documents were released to Khadr, after his lawyers sought the material under Access to Information laws.

In May, a Federal Court of Appeal judge ruled that wasn't good enough.

Khadr's lawyers say the Canadian government is hypocritical in its positions. On the one hand, it refuses to ask the U.S. to return Khadr to Canada, saying it expects the U.S. to accord him due process and a fair trial. On the other hand, Khadr's lawyers say Ottawa's refusal to fully disclose documents make it unlikely he will get one.

Canada's actions are aggravated by the fact Khadr was 15 at the time, they say.

"The Canadian government's actions suggest more than mere indifference to Omar's plight – by interrogating Omar as a child in Guantanamo, the government has been complicit in violations of Omar's basic human rights," Dennis Edney, Khadr's lead Canadian lawyer, said in a written statement.