Omar Khadr to make speaking appearance
Omar Khadr, the former child soldier whose war crimes convictions made him a political lightning rod for both Conservative and Liberal governments, is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at a Dalhousie University event next month.
Khadr, 33, is one of two keynote speakers at an event to mark a day of protest against the use of child soldiers, hosted by the university and the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative. The other keynote is Ishmael Beah, 39, a former Sierra Leonean child soldier, and Dallaire will also speak, along with Shelly Whitman, an academic expert on children in armed conflict. CBC journalist Nahlah Ayed will moderate.
Promotional material says Khadr and Beah will “highlight their experience in conflict and why they are passionate about the protection of children.” The event, which is free with a suggested donation to Dallaire’s charity, marks the first public speaking appearance for Khadr since last spring, when a judge ruled his eightyear sentence has been fully served.
Khadr’s case remains hotly contested in the U. S. Last week, an appeal court decided not to force the U. S. Court of Military Commission Review to hear Khadr’s appeal of his war crimes convictions, which were based on a confession he gave to escape from the extraterritorial prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and which he has since recanted.
The court found there are unsettled legal issues in a separate terrorism appeal, and said it was “confident” Khadr’s appeal would be heard once those issues are resolved.
Khadr’s father, a notorious al- Qaida financier, left Omar, then aged 15, with a group of Islamist militants in a village near Khost, Afghanistan in 2002. They were engaged by U.S. forces that July, in a firefight that left U. S. Sgt. Christopher Speer dead.
Khadr was wounded, captured, and taken in October, 2002, to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held without charge until declared an “enemy combatant” in 2005.
Rather than helping him as a Canadian, Canada participated in his interrogation under what the Supreme Court later called “oppressive circumstances,” specifically, sleep deprivation. The court found this a serious breach of Khadr’s Charter rights.
He was sentenced to eight years after pleading guilty in 2010, transferred to Canada in 2012, and bailed in 2015 pending an appeal of his U.S. Military Commission convictions. He said his guilty plea was made only in order to get out of Guantanamo Bay.
Speer’s widow and children sued Khadr in Utah, along with Layne Morris, who was seriously injured and blinded in the firefight. Khadr was eventually ordered to pay Speer and Morris US$ 134 million. Speers widow and Morris have not collected on that judgment. In 2017, the Canadian government paid Khadr $ 10.5- million to settle his lawsuit.