Granting Omar Khadr Bail Is Not Good Enough

After 13 years in prison, Omar Khadr was granted bail on Friday by a judge in Edmonton, Alberta. Khadr's case has been the subject of international criticism: he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was just 15, and is currently serving an eight-year sentence (despite having been detained for over a decade before that) for killing an American combat medic with a grenade. Khadr confessed to the crime while he was being held in Guantanamo, where he spent eight years and alleges that he, like many prisoners there, was tortured.

Khadr himself described the abuses to which he has been subjected in a 2014 op-ed for the Ottawa Citizen:

What's happened to Khadr (and might continue to happen, since the federal government is appealing his bail) is a travesty several times over.

For starters, Khadr's supposed confession seems clearly to have been coerced from him. In 2010, journalist Glenn Greenwald detailed the capture: "Khadr, then 15 years old, was taken to Bagram near death, after being shot twice in the back, blinded by shrapnel, and buried in rubble from a bomb blast. He was interrogated within hours, while sedated and handcuffed to a stretcher. He was threatened with gang rape and death if he didn't cooperate with interrogators." And this was only the beginning of his 11-year stay at Guantanamo.

It goes against every standard democratic, Western legal doctrine to use a confession to a crime made under duress of this nature.

But it's clear, based on the rhetoric around Khadr's case, that there is disagreement on the definition and use of torture. One thing that isn't up for debate, though, is that child soldiers are not supposed to be held criminally responsible for things they do as child soldiers.

Khadr was 15 when the alleged grenade-throwing took place, 15 when he was interrogated at death's door. Because he was under 18, he should have been afforded the same sympathy extended to the Lord's Resistance Army child soldiers, whose plight helped spur the "KONY2012" social justice campaign to capture LRA leader Joseph Kony.

"Ultimately this… is about the accountability of the Canadian government to all Canadians," the law firm Phillips Gill wrote about its lawsuit alleging the Canadian government knew about Khadr's treatment in Guantanamo. "This is about fundamental rights—rights that the Canadian government has guaranteed in our constitution to apply to every Canadian citizen—and how those rights appear to have been ignored in Omar's case."

It's widely understood that children forced to fight in other people's wars are not war criminals or monsters. That the Canadian government refuses to accept this fact about Khadr is appalling, and it means that while Khadr being granted bail today is a good thing, the horrific injustices he's suffered are a long way from over.

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