Rights apply to everyone,
Omar Khadr is about to get a multimillion-dollar settlement from the Canadian government, and that will upset a fair number of people. The idea that someone convicted of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan would receive a big cheque from taxpayers may be hard to swallow.
It shouldn’t be. Anyone familiar with Khadr’s story over the past15 years should realize he was bound to win compensation eventually from Ottawa for its repeated failure to uphold his legal rights.
This is not a case of the Trudeau government casually handing over millions of dollars to a convicted terrorist, as some Conservatives are trying to argue. Jason Kenney, the former Harper minister who now leads Conservatives in Alberta, condemned the reported settlement on Tuesday as “odious.”
Kenney should know better. As he surely is aware, no less an authority than the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that federal officials violated Khadr’s basic rights by taking part in the mistreatment he was subjected to while he was imprisoned and tried by U.S. authorities in Afghanistan and the notorious detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.
As the Supreme Court wrote bluntly in 2010, “Canada actively participated in a process contrary to its international human rights obligations and contributed to (Khadr’s) ongoing detention so as to deprive him of his right to liberty and security of the person.”
Further, by questioning him while he was held without legal counsel and subjected to sleep deprivation and other types of abuse, Canadian intelligence agents took part in treatment that the top court said “offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.”
Other Canadian courts have repeatedly condemned Khadr’s treatment from the time U.S. soldiers detained him while he was fighting against them at the age of 15 in Afghanistan.
The Alberta Court of Appeal, for one, found that the way he was treated “violated both the Charter and international human rights law.”
As has been exhaustively chronicled, U.S. authorities accused Khadr of throwing a grenade that killed an American medic, Sgt. Christopher Speer. Khadr eventually confessed to that act and pleaded guilty to a host of charges, including murder.
He later recanted his confession, which is irreparably tainted by the abuse he was subjected to while held at Guantanamo Bay and threatened with a lifetime of detention without trial unless he pleaded guilty. He was held for more than a decade in legal limbo, outside the scope of regular U.S. law in a place where “enhanced interrogation techniques” and outright torture were routine.
All this was on top of the fact that he qualified as a child soldier under UN conventions that Canada had pledged to uphold. The government should have done all it could to protect him, not co-operate in his legal persecution.
Khadr, now 30, has been seeking compensation for years. He was freed on bail in Edmonton in May of last year, and according to reports by the Star’s Michelle Shepherd and others, his lawyers have negotiated a settlement with Ottawa that involves an apology and a package worth about $10 million.
The government is right to stop fighting Khadr in court and reach a deal with him. Given the abuse he suffered and the track record of support from the Supreme Court and other legal authorities he has accumulated, it seems inevitable that he would win eventually — and possibly end up with even more money.
The reported settlement is in line with other financial deals involving Canadians caught up in the global anti-terrorist fight. Back in 2007, for example, the Harper government paid $10.5 million in compensation to Maher Arar for Ottawa’s complicity in his torture.
Conservatives such as Kenney should stop grandstanding on this issue. It’s time for the government to acknowledge its mistakes and learn from them. In this case, the lesson is that rights apply to everyone — including Omar Khadr.