U.S. plaintiffs fire back at Khadr defence

Former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr cannot avoid a huge civil judgment against him by recanting the confession and guilty plea he made before an American military commission, lawyers acting for the widow of a U.S. special forces soldier argue in new court filings.

Canadian courts must accept the agreed statement of facts that underpinned Khadr’s war-crimes conviction in 2010, they argue, regardless of whether he lied under oath when he admitted to tossing a hand grenade that killed the soldier eight years earlier.

“No court anywhere, either in Canada or the U.S., has found the (agreed statement) specifically was involuntary or the product of coercion,” the lawyers state in their filing last month. “A sworn confession is not lightly ignored, particularly when (Khadr) benefited significantly from it in terms of a plea agreement resulting in a reduced sentence and the eligibility to be commuted back to Canada.”

Nor is it relevant, they argue, how Khadr was treated after American forces captured him as a 15-year-old in Afghanistan in July 2002 and shipped him off to the infamous prison where, Canadian courts have concluded, he was abused and his rights violated.

The lawyers are calling on Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench to enforce a US$132-million judgment against Khadr handed down in Utah in June 2015 in favour of Sgt. Chris Speer’s widow, Tabitha Speer, and former U.S. special forces soldier Layne Morris.