Law and Right Wing Politicians in Canada

The "Conservative" Party of Canada would, you would think, respect the laws and traditions of the land. But you would be wrong.

Stephen Harper has consistently ignored pleas by Canadians that he press the US to release the child soldier Omar Khadr. For the last 7 months he has been ignoring the ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada:

On January 29, 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada released its judgment in Prime Minister of Canada v. Omar Khadr. The Court found that Canada's actions 'offend the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects" and required the government to grant Omar a remedy.

Instead, the US is putting Omar Khadr on trial. This 15 year old kid whose only real crime is that his father is a terrorist and he was in a family that brain-washed him, has been tortured and imprisoned by the US for 8 years. Under UN law, you can't try a child as if he were a soldier. The child is a victim. But the US plays by its own rules. Not only does the US torture in a flagrant violation of human rights, he has imprisoned and tortured this kid -- now adult -- for a "crime" that you should not adjudicate. He should have been released into some child welfare authorities. The US claims he assisted in attacking US troops but the only witnesses for the defense were killed by the US soldiers.

His father was a brutal terrorist. His mother and older sister -- who reside safely in Canada!! -- are Al Qaeda sympathizers and dangerous people. I have no love for his family. I don't know how brain washed Omar Khadr is, but I have to believe that at 15 you can't be held responsible for acting the way your father demands of you. His older brother Abdurahman Khadr clearly wasn't a terrorist and hated being dragged off to Afghanistan and wanted to stay in Canada. He did no fighting, but the American arrested him and jailed him despite that fact, they let him out to work as an informer, and then they dumped him in the Middle East when they had exhausted his "value" to them, so he had to fight to get back home to Canada.

Here's a group of students and lawyers trying to get justice for Omar Khadr.

Here's a National Post timeline giving the facts and dates known about the Khadr family. (A more extensive and even less sympathetic timeline is here.)

Bottom line: Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have no respect for the rule of law. They have broken the law by failing to defend the rights of a Canadian, by becoming agents of a foreign country (the US), and for ignoring the legal rulings of Canadian courts.