Canada's government violated the Constitution when it gave US officials results of interviews conducted with a Canadian detainee at the Guantanamo Bay prison, the nation's top court said on Friday.
The high court ruled 9-0 that Omar Khadr has a constitutional right to material directly related to interviews that Canadian intelligence officials conducted with him during his detention.
Khadr’s attorneys say they will use the documents to help defend him against a murder charge before a US tribunal.
Khadr was captured in July 2002 and is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a US special forces soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan. He was 15 at the time and is now 21.
He has been held since October 2002 at the prison, where some 275 men are held for alleged links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
DISCLOSURE
The court said the Canadian government violated a provision in Canada’s Bill of Rights that requires disclosure of evidence.
The high court said Canada was wrong to interrogate Khadr in a place where international human rights laws are not followed and that Canada became a participant in a process that violated its human rights obligations.
The court said a lower court judge would now review the interview material, receive submissions from the parties and “decide which documents fall within the scope of the disclosure obligation.”
That could leave the door open for the government to raise objections on some material by citing national security.
Nathan Whitling, Khadr’s lawyer, said that he was happy with the ruling, but the court’s decision limits what they will be able to see.
Whitling said he wanted the court to release a US military report, shared with Canada, that details the battle that resulted in the soldier’s death.
“The remedy is far short of what we’re hoping for,” Whitling said.
He said the interview transcripts could be useful but would not help Khadr to any significant degree.
UNLAWFUL
Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, said the Supreme Court’s decision makes a clear statement that the legal system under which Khadr was detained and charged was unlawful.
“The Canadian court’s decision is a declaration that Guantanamo is not an island without law,” he said in a statement.
Khadr’s attorneys argued before the court in March that Canadian intelligence officers violated Canada’s Bill of Rights by questioning him in 2003 at the US military base.
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
FOREST SITE: A rescue helicopter spotted the burning fuselage of the plane in a forested area, with rescue personnel saying they saw no evidence of survivors A passenger plane carrying nearly 50 people crashed yesterday in a remote spot in Russia’s far eastern region of Amur, with no immediate signs of survivors, authorities said. The aircraft, a twin-propeller Antonov-24 operated by Angara Airlines, was headed to the town of Tynda from the city of Blagoveshchensk when it disappeared from radar at about 1pm. A rescue helicopter later spotted the burning fuselage of the plane on a forested mountain slope about 16km from Tynda. Videos published by Russian investigators showed what appeared to be columns of smoke billowing from the wreckage of the plane in a dense, forested area. Rescuers in
‘ARBITRARY’ CASE: Former DR Congo president Joseph Kabila has maintained his innocence and called the country’s courts an instrument of oppression Former Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) president Joseph Kabila went on trial in absentia on Friday on charges including treason over alleged support for Rwanda-backed militants, an AFP reporter at the court said. Kabila, who has lived outside the DR Congo for two years, stands accused at a military court of plotting to overthrow the government of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi — a charge that could yield a death sentence. He also faces charges including homicide, torture and rape linked to the anti-government force M23, the charge sheet said. Other charges include “taking part in an insurrection movement,” “crime against the
RSS