The United States would never have really sought to convict the former Canadian detainee of Guantanamo Omar Khadr without the stubbornness of the former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who refused to repatriate him, concludes the columnist and author Frédéric Bérard in a new test.
While he was on a press trip under some pretext to the American Guantanamo base last summer, the lawyer, doctor of law and partner at GBM Avocats had something of an epiphany: the famous prison has never was designed to achieve justice. The American prosecutors who are sent to work in this parallel justice system have almost admitted it to him.
“For me, until then, Guantanamo was a kind of goofy, ridiculous justice, but which was still a mechanism to convict people. But I realized that themselves [les Américains sur place] don’t care, about justice”, says the author to the Dutyon the sidelines of the Wednesday publication of his latest essay, entitled I accuse the torturers of Omar Khadr and published by Saint-Jean Éditeur.
The 400-page book is a synthesis of everything we know about the sad fate of Omar Khadr and the frankly strange legal context of the American prison of Guantanamo, where the Canadian teenager languished for a decade. Frédéric Bérard traveled to the American enclave on the island of Cuba in June, escorted by paranoid soldiers who searched his cellphone. He was able to see the courtroom where Khadr stood trial, a “disgusting” place that “looks like a dentist’s office, with upholstered chairs and an old rotting carpet.”
Omar Khadr is presented by the author as “an ex-adolescent victim of the worst cruelty ever orchestrated by his own government”. The son of a relative of Osama bin Laden, taken prisoner in 2002 by the American army at the age of only 15, was not entitled to a fair trial.
“The Khadr case is like a puzzle of a million pieces. I tried to find credible sources for all the songs and put that together, explains Frédéric Bérard. When they brought Khadr to Guantanamo, it was not to accuse him, but to make him speak under torture. »
At least half of these pieces of the puzzle were in the 220 motions in Omar Khadr’s file filed with the military tribunal responsible for trying him, he says. The lawyer was able to consult them, retracing the main lines of the prison course of his subject. He also compiled hundreds of journalistic investigations to write the details of the tortures, often scabrous, that the Canadian suffered at Guantanamo.
Canada causes the problem
Unlike other Western countries, Canada never asked the United States to repatriate its national, even after the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, who promised to close this prison. This would have forced the military prosecutors to continue their proceedings before the improvised Guantanamo court, a flawed justice system criticized by various international organizations and which has managed to convict almost no one.
“Khadr is accused because Ottawa is not repatriating him, and Ottawa is not repatriating Khadr because he is accused”, summarizes the author, in a style that regularly deviates from that of a law course to borrow that of the militant pen.
Hence his thesis, which he assures is not contradicted by any evidence consulted: ex-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, above all, but also the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and even the Supreme Court are to blame for having perpetuated the violations of the fundamental rights of the famous Canadian prisoner.
The federal government kind of came to play in the head of the Supreme Court
It is based in particular on the remarks of the former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Hillary Clinton, reported by Khadr’s lawyer, Dennis Edney. Mme Clinton would have told the latter that Washington agreed with the transfer of his client to Canada, but that this was impossible without the agreement of the Prime Minister of Canada.
Current Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is quoted in the essay. At the time Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, he was repeating the government line that the American judicial process should run its course. The author traces the polls to conclude that this “propaganda” succeeded in convincing a growing part of public opinion at the time that it was better to leave the Canadian detainee at Guantanamo.
The then Conservative government did everything it could to avoid having to stage Khadr’s big comeback, which finally happened in 2012. The Canadian government compensated Omar Khadr with $10.5 million in 2017 , under the Justin Trudeau Liberals.
Finally, Bérard also denounces the Supreme Court, which, according to him, did not go far enough in its 2010 judgment. The highest court in the country concluded that the fundamental rights of citizen Khadr had indeed been flouted, but that could order his repatriation. Foreign affairs, the judgment reads: [tiennent] Canada’s broader national interests into account”.
“With respect, this reasoning is debatable,” criticizes the man who is also a member of the Quebec Bar and a lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the University of Montreal. According to him, this judgment is unique, since it implies that the government itself chooses its sanction. Frédéric Bérard even postulates that the judges could have been influenced by the threats of the government not to follow the orders of the Supreme Court, if the latter ordered the repatriation of Khadr. “The federal government kind of came to play inside the head of the Supreme Court,” he says.
Although the main lines of the story have been revealed in the media, the author says that during his week in Guantanamo he had the “eureka moment” of his eighth essay, “the hardest he had to write” , when he saw the lack of interest in justice expressed by the prosecutors themselves. A fiasco similar to the case of Omar Khadr could happen again, he fears, if Canada does not learn from this history.