Omar Khadr’s Bail Conditions: On 31st Birthday, Judge Allows Internet Access, Refuses to Lift Ban on Free Travel within Canada, or Unsupervised Meeting with Sister

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

Happy belated birthday to former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khadr, who turned 31 yesterday. Nearly three years since he was returned to Canada from Guantánamo, his birthday was an occasion to reflect on the mixed news from an Edmonton courtroom on Friday, in response to his request for his bail conditions to be eased.

Seized in Afghanistan at the age of 15 after a firefight that left him severely wounded, Khadr, who had been taken to Afghanistan by his father, was never rehabilitated, as the US is supposed to do with juvenile prisoners, according the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which both the US and Canada are signatories.

Instead, Khadr was subjected to torture and abuse, and, eventually, shamefully charged in a military commission trial on the basis that, in the firefight, he threw a grenade that killed a US soldier. Ignored by the US was his age at the time of the incident, and the very plausible claim that he never threw the grenade in the first place, having been face-down under a pile of rubble with horrendous injuries at the time the grenade was supposed to have been thrown.

Nevertheless, Barack Obama — to what should be his eternal shame — presided over Khadr’s trial, and his plea deal in October 2010, when he agreed to the charges, because he saw it as his only way of getting out of Guantánamo. In exchange for his plea deal, he received an eight-year sentence, with one year to be served in Guantánamo and seven in Canada.

However, the Canadian government was in no hurry to get Khadr back, and it was nearly two years until he returned home, in September 2012, and another two and a half years of legal wrangling before he was released on bail in May 2015, to finally have the opportunity to rebuild his life.

The Canadian government’s position regarding Khadr had long been condemned, at the highest levels of the country’s judicial system. In 2010, as I explained in an article in 2013:

[T]he Canadian Supreme Court ruled that his rights had been violated when Canadian agents interrogated him at Guantánamo in 2003, when he was just 16. The Court stated, “Interrogation of a youth, to elicit statements about the most serious criminal charges while detained in these conditions and without access to counsel, and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the US prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.”

Finally, in July this year, Canada’s shameful treatment of Omar Khadr resulted in him receiving a compensation payment of $10.5m (about $9m in US currency).

Despite this, however, some of his bail conditions were still in force.

Some had been eased two years ago, around the time of his 29th birthday. As I reported at the time:

Two weeks ago, as I described it, he “asked a Canadian court to ease his bail conditions, so he can fly to Toronto to visit his family, attend a night course at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), and get to early morning prayers,” and last week Justice June Ross of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta agreed to relax his curfew to allow him to attend night classes and early morning prayers, reserving judgment on his other request until this week. On Friday (September 18), as hoped, his bail conditions have been eased still further. As the Edmonton Journal reported, Justice Ross said that he “can travel to visit his grandparents in Toronto for two weeks this fall.” In addition, his electronic tag will be removed.

As the Toronto Star described it, Justice Ross “said it is important that some restrictions remain, to ensure Khadr doesn’t have terrorist associations. But she added that he has complied with all conditions since he was released four months ago, and a gradual release into the community ‘is the best way to ensure he doesn’t pose a danger to the public.’” She added, “There is no reason why he should not have a visit with his family.”

For the Toronto visit, as the Edmonton Journal put it, he must travel with Dennis Edney, his lawyer for many years, in whose house he is living, and is also required to “stay with his maternal grandparents or his Toronto lawyer John Philipps, provide a phone number and address, and report to his bail supervisor.” In a sign of how micro-managed his freedoms are, despite these concessions, he “will be allowed to speak to his maternal grandparents in a language other than English, but not his controversial mother or sister Zaynab, both of whom now live outside Canada. Three brothers and one other sister live in Toronto.”

Since then, as the Edmonton Journal explained, “Restrictions that prevented Khadr from freely communicating with other members of his family, including his mother, have … been eased,” but the ban on having unsupervised visits with his sister remains in place, and his request for it to be dropped was denied in court on Friday by Justice Ross, who continues to deal with his efforts to have his bail conditions eased.

Khadr had hoped to be able to freely meet his sister who, according to the Canadian Press, “is now reportedly living in Sudan with her fourth husband, but is planning a visit to Canada.” CBC News added that, although she was born in Ottawa, “she was at one point unable to get a Canadian passport after frequently reporting hers lost,” and was also “subject to an RCMP investigation in 2005, but faced no charges.” It was also noted that “[h]er third husband, Canadian Joshua Boyle, is reportedly still a Taliban hostage along with his American wife and children in Afghanistan” (and see here for more on that story).

However, Justice Ross “refused to remove restrictions stipulating” that he can “communicate with his sister in English only and in the presence of a court-appointed supervisor, his lawyers or bail supervisor,” as CBC News Edmonton described it.

Notoriously, Zaynab Khadr had, in the past, expressed support for al-Qaeda, while her brother was still at Guantánamo, but Omar’s efforts to persuade Justice Ross that, whatever her views, he was not impressionable, failed to convince her.

In a sworn affidavit, Khadr said, ”I am now an adult and I think independently. Even if the members of my family were to wish to influence my religious or other views, they would not be able to control or influence me in any negative manner.”

Justice Ross also “denied Khadr’s request to have his travel restrictions softened, meaning he will still require authorization to leave Alberta and travel within Canada,” as CBC News described it, noting that this was in spite of his lawyer, Nathan Whitling, arguing in court that his “requests to visit his elderly grandparents in Toronto had always been approved in the past.”

As Whitling told reporters after the hearing, “He’s been getting permission anyway, so it’s not a huge big deal, but it is pretty onerous for him to have to seek advanced permission any time he wants to take a trip to Toronto.”

Justice Ross also granted Khadr “greater access to the internet as long as he stays away from anything to do with terrorism on the web.”

Whistling also told reporters that Khadr was “disappointed” by aspects of the ruling, explaining that, when it came to his sister, “He does want to be able to contact his sister and he doesn’t see how he’s going to be able to speak to his nieces and nephews without having some sort of supervisor present at the time.”

In his affidavit, Khadr, who recently got married, also explained that “he has been accepted to a nursing program in Alberta and wishes to put his legal matters behind him,” as CBC News put it. He added, however, as CTV News described it, that his client is “doing very well,” and that the requirements that he “seek permission before travelling within Canada and only contact his sister only ‘in the presence of some responsible person who has been approved in advance by his bail supervisor’ are more of an ‘inconvenience’ than a ‘big deal.’”

As Whitling said, “Everything’s going just fine for him. I don’t want to pretend this is a major burden on him.”

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 the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.