The law and justice need not be strangers

Omar Khadr’s compensation should’ve been decided by jury

Poverty is invariably relative, which is why headlines about one in five Canadian kids growing up poor should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism.

I did not grow up in a poor family. True, we lived in a council house, had no car, TV, fridge, telephone or washing machine, and lunch was often ketchup on white bread, but the rest of the folk in our mining village lived essentially the same.

So we neither felt poor nor would be judged as such by those keeping percentile score of these things at the United Nations.

Still, even to me, on a momentous day in the autumn of 1961, a ha’penny wasn’t much. My mother opened her palm and provided it as future recompense for enduring my upcoming first day of school. It was barely enough, at day’s end, to buy one lonely gobstopper at the candy store.

No, a ha’penny — worth half of one of those old, pre-decimalization U.K. pennies — was then the smallest-value coin of the realm. And if a five-year-old didn’t think much of it then surely Dr. Wladislaw Dering held it in even less regard when, a few years later, he was awarded that same sad coinage in damages.

Yet there, half a century ago, is the answer to our conundrum surrounding Omar Khadr. Because the law and justice need not be separate bedfellows, as the libel trial involving Dering showed.

The Polish doctor moved to England after the war, during which he worked as a medic in Auschwitz, in charge of an operating theatre in Block 21 at that notorious death camp. He arrived as another doomed prisoner, but the Nazis saw potential.

It was the author Leon Uris who, in his bestselling novel, Exodus, mentioned Dering — in an almost throwaway sentence of that epic book — as responsible for carrying out 17,000 operations, many medically unnecessary and performed without anesthetic.

The doctor sued for libel and, in 1964, a High Court jury heard 130 witnesses testify in harrowing detail that, indeed, they were victims of Dering’s experimental operations. However, Uris’s lawyers never could substantiate the 17,000 number and with that, their case was lost.

But juries are comprised of ordinary folk and regularly show an instinct for justice even if the finer parts of the law escape them. So, in delivering their verdict in Dering’s favour, they also specified damages to be paid. For the hurt caused to his reputation, they granted one ha’penny, deeming it the proper compensation.

Juries by necessity find common ground, but in an increasingly divided society we often prefer to shun such niceties. Politicians, cognizant of the present — Justin Trudeau was away at the G20 — and the future — it’s halfway through the electoral cycle so people will forget — took a calculated risk in announcing the $10.3-million settlement with Khadr.

Please understand, the government had no legal grounds to fight Khadr’s lawsuit; the only question was what would be paid in compensation. The Supreme Court already ruled his rights were trampled as a young Canadian citizen when he was held in the legal abyss of Guantanamo Bay with our government’s blessing.

That verdict was delivered years ago. That’s the law and, as the prime minister said last week, we’re a country in which such rules are paramount.

But we’re also a country of justice and that multimillion-dollar compensation deal was released when the clever lot deemed it an appropriate time. It stank to high heaven.

Khadr is a Canadian citizen and, no matter our thoughts about him as an individual, we should never strip anyone of their rights retrospectively. Why? Because down that path our rights lie threatened.

Yet, we could have seen it through to the end and not simply settled for expediency’s sake. We could have allowed a jury of Khadr’s Canadian peers to decide upon suitable compensation.

Darn it, inflation put an end to the once mighty cent.

Oh well, how does a nickel sound?