AlterNet: Canada's Child Soldier Problem

As Canada apologizes for putting the U.S. on a list of countries that torture, its own government stays silent on the case of Omar Khadr.

(snip)

The manual was never supposed to have been publicly released, of course, but the Canadian government inadvertently released it to lawyers for Amnesty International as evidence in a court case relating to the alleged abuse of Afghan detainees, after they were handed over by Canadian soldiers to the local Afghan authorities. After realizing their mistake, government officials desperately tried to get the manual back, stating, as CTV put it bluntly, that they "wanted to black out sensitive parts that may anger allies."

It's too late for that, of course. While US ambassador David Wilkins declared, "We find it to be offensive for us to be on the same list with countries like Iran and China," adding, "Quite frankly it's absurd," lawyers and human rights activists have seized upon the documents to insist, for the second time in only a few months, that the Canadian government is guilty of double standards in its refusal to act on behalf of Omar Khadr, a Canadian Guantánamo detainee who was just 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in July 2002.

And they're right to do so. The first set of double standards was highlighted in September, when, during a visit to Canada to publicize Mr. Khadr's plight, his US military lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, contrasted the Canadian government's "leadership in international efforts to recognize child soldiers as victims in need of special protection and rehabilitation" with its "virtual silence" in the case of his client. Just two weeks ago, David Crane, the former US prosecutor for Sierra Leone's war crimes trials, who is now a professor at Syracuse University, revived this argument, telling Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star that he failed to understand how Canada and the United States "could be sympathetic to the plight of Africa's child soldiers, who are forced to commit atrocious crimes," but not to Khadr, whose circumstances were the same. "I'm just not sure why the Canadian government, which was tremendously important in my work in West Africa--they were incredibly supportive--is not making a bigger deal of this," he said.

This latest revelation only adds to the government's self-inflicted woes. As Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, explained to CTV, the new developments cast doubt on the government's assertion that Khadr is being treated fairly in US custody. "Canada has just admitted we believe torture is possible in Guantánamo Bay," he told the broadcaster's Canada AM show. "That clashes terribly with what Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said, that Mr. Khadr, who is in Guantánamo Bay and was a child at the time he was put there, is being given a (quote, unquote) appropriate judicial process. Torture is not an appropriate judicial process." Attaran went on to suggest that the Canadian government's refusal to demand Khadr's release from Guantánamo was purely political. "Out of a desire to appear tough on the war on terror, Mr. Harper has put this set of considerations out the window, and that's not appropriate," he said, adding, "We have to obey the law."

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http://www.alternet.org/rights/74464/