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OTTAWA (AFP) — Canada’s opposition leader on Wednesday urged the prime minister to try to repatriate the last Western detainee at the US “war on terror” camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, calling his jailing “illegal.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper must “do everything in his power to repatriate Canadian Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr to Canada where his rights as a Canadian citizen will be respected,” Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said in a statement.

Khadr has been held at the US naval facility since his arrest in 2002, when he was 15 years old, and faces a US military trial for alleged war crimes in October.

According to Dion, his detention and upcoming prosecution under the US Military Commission Act “constitutes a violation of the fundamental principles of the rule of law including: arbitrary and illegal detention, denial of procedural due process, denial of the right to counsel and denial of the right to trial within a reasonable time before a fair and impartial tribunal.”

“By refusing to intervene to uphold principles of fundamental justice in the Omar Khadr case, you have signaled that Canada now consents to its citizens being tried for retroactively designated crimes; on the basis of secret evidence; on the basis of testimony extracted under torture and that Canada no longer supports the presumption of innocence,” he said in an open letter to Harper.

Legal experts, human rights groups and several Canadian politicians have already demanded Khadr be released from Guantanamo, saying his age at the time of capture precludes any war crimes proceedings.

But Harper pointedly refused.

The US government says Khadr was the lone survivor of a US bombardment of a compound in eastern Afghanistan who rose from the rubble and killed a US sergeant with a grenade.

Khadr’s US lawyer, Lieutenant-Commander Bill Kuebler, instead described him to a Canadian Commons committee as a “frightened, wounded, 15-year-old boy … who sat slumped against a bush while a battle raged around him.”

“Omar Khadr is accused of a serious crime,” Dion commented. “But the seriousness of a crime does not dictate the level of denial of justice that one can inflict on an accused.”

August 1st, 2008 | Category: Canada, Detainee, Guantanamo, Kangaroo Kourt |  Print This Post | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL