Prison vs. jail: Khadr’s fate up to top court
Government fighting ruling that he can finish his term as a juvenile
The Gordian knot known as Omar Khadr will tie up the Supreme Court of Canada next week for the third time in seven years.
The Conservative government wants the former Guantanamo Bay detainee kept confined to a federal prison in Alberta, overturning a provincial appellate court ruling that Khadr, 28, can serve his remaining U.S. sentence as a juvenile in an Edmonton jail.
The high-court showdown, set for May 14, is but one battle in the seemingly intractable legal warfare between the government and Khadr that’s being waged on three fronts and is even expected to spill into the fall federal election campaign.
On Tuesday, an Alberta Court of Appeal judge ordered Khadr back to the Bowden Institution, a federal prison in Innisfail, Alta., while she weighs an emergency motion by federal lawyers to halt Khadr from being released on bail. The government considers him to be a terrorist who would do “irreparable harm” to the country if released. That decision was expected Thursday.
Also Thursday, an Alberta lower court is to set the conditions of Khadr’s release, provided bail is granted by the Alberta high court.
The backdrop for all of this is Khadr’s attempt to appeal his 2010 war crimes convictions by a U.S. military commission. His lawyers want him freed on bail while he fights for that re-examination.
As part of a plea deal, the then24-year-old pleaded guilty to the 2002 murder of a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan and four other battlefield crimes. He was 15 at the time and a member of “Canada’s first family of terrorism,” led by his Egyptian-Canadian father Ahmed Said Khadr, an al-Qaida operative.
Omar Khadr — his father was killed in 2003 by Pakistan security forces — was sentenced to 40 years, but only ordered to serve eight. (After one year, Canada let him serve the remaining seven years here.)
How U.S. military authorities arrived at the eight-year sentence is unclear, and that’s the crux of the federal appeal to the top court.
Lawyers for the Canadian and Alberta governments argue the Correctional Service of Canada correctly interpreted the eight-year U.S. sentence as being applicable to each of the five convictions. Khadr, they reason, therefore must serve his time as an adult in a federal prison. The province also argues its jails are designed for short terms of incarceration with few resources for long-term offenders.
But Khadr’s lawyers believe the U.S. sentenced Khadr to eight years total for all five offences. And if those offences had been committed in Canada and because of Khadr’s age at the time, the sentence could have been imposed as youth sentence, according to their case factum. That would entitle him to serve in a provincial jail.
Khadr was last before the Supreme Court in 2010. It declared that federal actions had violated his constitutional rights and steps should be take to rectify the wrong. Two years earlier, in 2008, the court ruled Canadian officials participated in an “illegal” process when they shared information with the U.S. about Khadr.