Lawyers ask for urgent freeze on settlement
Lawyers for the widow of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan will ask a Canadian court to freeze the $10.5-million settlement the federal government has paid to Omar Khadr.
Documents filed in an Ontario court say Tabitha Speer and Sgt. Layne Morris, who was injured during the same firefight that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer in 2002, have “repeatedly requested assurances that the assets will not be dissipated” before their claim to the money can be resolved.
“There has been no response,” the documents read.
They will ask the court on Thursday to put an urgent hold on the money.
On Friday, the federal government issued a public apology to Khadr, who was held in Guantanamo Bay for 10 years, during which he pleaded guilty to killing Speer. In 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada found that the methods used to interrogate Khadr at Guantanamo, including sleep deprivation, violated his rights.
The government also reached a settlement with Khadr, and reportedly paid him $10.5 million last week for the violation of his charter rights by Canadian authorities. The government would not confirm the amount.
In 2015 a U.S. judge awarded Morris and Tabitha Speer $134.2 million in damages in a lawsuit they filed against Khadr. The ruling was never enforced, but now that Khadr has received a settlement, they are seeking to have the decision upheld in Canada.
According to the court documents, Speer and Morris’s legal counsel have twice asked if Khadr is prepared to pay those funds into court — a method of holding onto the money until a judge rules on their application — and have received no answer.
“If the assets are not frozen pending the hearing of the application, there may be no assets left in Canada upon which the applicants may execute,” the lawyers warn.
In an interview Monday, Khadr’s lawyer said their position is that the U.S. judgment was based on Khadr’s conviction at Guantanamo Bay, and therefore will likely not hold up in a Canadian court.
Nathan Whitling would not comment on the whereabouts of any money paid to Khadr. The court documents suggest that “steps have been taken to ‘legally shelter’ the assets from the reach of creditors,” based largely on media reports.
“They filed evidence based upon some statement in a news report based on an anonymous source,” Whitling said, adding that he believes such claims are “without any value whatsoever.”
He said that transferring funds to another entity to avoid creditors can be deemed a fraudulent transaction.
“There’s no evidence that anything of that nature has occurred in this case.”
Speer and Morris’s lawyers have also asked for “an accounting of the settlement funds, and the current location of all such funds, or property acquired thereby.”