Edmonton judge to rule on Khadr request for eased bail conditions
Posted Dec 21, 2018 2:00 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
EDMONTON — An Edmonton judge is to rule Friday on former Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr’s request for relaxed bail conditions and a Canadian passport.
His lawyer Nathan Whitling said it’s not fair that Khadr’s life remains restricted by a stalled U.S. court process with no end in sight.
“His case is different because of the extraordinarily long time that he’s been on bail … because of the extraordinary delays that have occurred with his foreign appeal,” Whitling said in an interview.
Khadr, 32, wants to be able to travel to Toronto without the approval of his bail supervisor to visit his family more easily and to make court appearances related to a civil lawsuit filed by the family of an American soldier killed in the Afghanistan firefight in which Khadr was captured
He also wants unsupervised conversations with his sister and a Canadian passport so that he can make the hajj to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The Islamic religious pilgrimage is considered obligatory for practising Muslims.
Currently, he must contact his bail supervisor if he wants to leave Alberta. He can only talk under supervision to his sister Zaynab, who has spoken in favour of al-Qaida and was investigated in Canada more than a decade ago for helping the terrorist network.
Khadr said his sister now lives in the country of Georgia.
He has been on bail since May 2015, when it was granted by an Alberta judge pending appeal of Khadr’s conviction by a U.S. military commission on alleged war crimes. The appeal in the U.S. has stalled and Khadr has no idea of how long his bail conditions will last.
“In Canada, appeals move quickly,” Whitling said. “This is pending a foreign appeal, which has never happened before and this foreign appeal is extraordinarily slow.”
He said his client has lived quietly for years, is happily married, follows bail conditions to the letter and poses no threat. Khadr’s affidavit says he has been to Toronto eight times without issue since the conditions were imposed.
It’s the latest of several attempts for relaxed bail conditions. In 2017, a judge denied most of his requests.
Khadr was sent to the notorious U.S. military holding facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 after he was captured and accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in 2002.
He was 15 at the time and says he can’t remember killing the soldier. He says he only confessed to the crime to get out of Guantanamo and into the Canadian justice system.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that Khadr’s rights were violated while he was in captivity in the U.S. and that the Canadian government had contributed to that. Khadr settled a lawsuit against Ottawa in 2017 with a $10.5-million payout.
— Follow Bob Weber on Twitter at @row1960
Bob Weber, The Canadian Press
