Seven Years Since He Left Guantánamo, Judge Rules That Omar Khadr’s Sentence Is Over, and He Is A Free Man
by Andy Worthington
28.3.19
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Back in December, I reported how, although Khadr was given an eight-year sentence after agreeing to a plea deal in his military commission trial at Guantánamo on October 31, 2010, the Canadian government continued to impose restrictions on his freedom — disregarding the fact that their ability to do so should have come to an end with the end of his sentence on October 31, 2018.
As I explained in December, Khadr had been in court seeking “changes to his bail conditions, requesting to be allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia to perform the hajj (which would require him to be given a passport), and to speak unsupervised with his sister, who is now living in Georgia.” However, the judge, Justice June Ross of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta, refused to end the restrictions on his freedom to travel, or to communicate with his sister Zainab, who I described as “a controversial figure who, in the past, had expressed support for al-Qaeda.”
It had been a long journey for Khadr over the previous eight years. Under the terms of his plea deal, he was supposed to have spent one more year in Guantánamo followed by seven years’ further imprisonment in Canada, but as I also explained in December:
In fact, it took nearly two years before he was returned to Canada, and, when he was returned, the Canadian authorities then held him for as long as possible in a maximum security prison, only relenting in August 2013 when, as I described it in 2014,
“Canada’s prison ombudsman Ivan Zinger, the executive director of the independent Office of the Correctional Investigator, said that prison authorities had ‘ignored favorable information’ in ‘unfairly branding’ Khadr as a maximum security inmate.”
In January 2014 he was moved to a medium security facility, and in April 2015 he was finally granted bail, moving in with his attorney Dennis Edney, who had cared for him for many years as though he was his own son.
On his 29th birthday, in September 2015, a judge eased his bail conditions, allowing him to visit his grandparents, and agreeing to have his electronic tag removed, and two years later, on his 31st birthday, he was allowed internet access, although bans remained on his ability to travel freely within Canada, or to meeting his sister Zainab.
Monday’s ruling, then, was long overdue, although we should all be thankful to Court of Queen’s Bench Chief Justice Mary Moreau, who, as CBC News described it, “counted the time Khadr spent on conditional release for nearly four years as counting toward his eight-year sentence,” and “declared his sentence over.”
CBC News added that, “After the judge left the courtroom, a beaming Khadr embraced his lawyer, Nate Whitling,” and, outside the court, said he was pleased with the decision.
“I think it’s been a while but I’m happy it’s here, and right now I’m going to just try to focus on recovering and not worrying about having to go back to prison, or, you know, just struggling,” he told reporters.
Whitling, as CBC News put it, “said efforts to overturn Khadr’s US convictions will continue,” but he confirmed that “the completion of his sentence will mean more freedom” for Khadr.
“All those conditions that were restricting his liberty up to this point are now gone, so for example he can apply for a passport, he can talk to his sister, he can travel around the world or around Canada without having to seek permission,” Whitling explained.
He also noted that, under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, the government has no right to appeal the decision.
“It’s a final decision,” he said.
“So we do expect this is the end of the road in terms of having to deal with Mr. Khadr’s sentence.”
Speaking of the situation in the US, Whiting confirmed that he and Khadr “think that these convictions will eventually be overturned,” adding, “And I think it will be determined there was never any jurisdiction to try Mr. Khadr for these offences.”
The ongoing plight of Guantánamo’s unconvicted “enemy combatants”
While everyone who respects justice and the rule of law should be grateful that the Canadian establishment has seen sense, and has ceased to impose unreasonable restrictions on Omar Khadr five months after his sentence should actually have come to an end, the lifting of restrictions on his life stands in stark constant to the restrictions imposed on other former Guantánamo prisoners.
As I discussed just two weeks ago, in an article entitled, As Mohamedou Ould Slahi is Denied a Passport, Remember That All Former Guantánamo Prisoners Live Without Fundamental Rights, in Mauritania, former Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi has not had his passport returned, even though he was told he would get it back two years after his release. That should have been in October 2018, but Slahi didn’t receive his passport, and cannot get an answer from anyone about whether it is the fault of his own government, or if the US is still meddling in his life.
As I proceeded to explain in my article, Slahi’s case is typical of how former prisoners are subject to endless interference in their lives with no explanation and no basis in law. For prisoners repatriated to their home countries, as I explained, “deals were made between the US government and the prisoners’ home governments,” but “details of these deals have never been made public,” and, in any case, “whatever deals are arranged have absolutely no context in international law.”
I added that, for those given new homes in third countries, “the situation is arguably even worse, because there is absolutely no precedent for people held by the US at Guantánamo without rights to then be transferred to a third country, where they cannot call upon any of the presumed rights that come with nationality.”
In conclusion, I stated that “[t]he status of the ‘un-people’ of Guantánamo is a peculiarly aberrant post-9/11 creation, and one that cannot be allowed to stand forever,” and called on the Trump administration to re-instate the crucial role of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, which existed under President Obama, as well as explaining that it is “time for the international community to come together to demand that the disgraceful labeling of people as ‘enemy combatants,’ forever under suspicion, and forever without rights, needs to be brought to an end,” and asking anyone interested in helping address this to get in touch with me to work out how we might deal with it.
This is an invitation that still stands, and, belatedly, Omar Khadr’s case shows why it is so necessary. As someone who went through a legal process — however broken and unjust that process was — Omar Khadr, in the end, has been able to avail himself of rights that, absurdly, those also held at Guantánamo, but never charged or tried, cannot rely on. As he stated in December, when he challenged Justice Ross’s refusal to drop all his bail restrictions, “I am going to continue to fight this injustice and thankfully we have an actual court system that has actual rules and laws.”
For most former “enemy combatants,” sadly, this is simply not true.
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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.
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