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February 26, 2008 Yesterday, the president of the Canadian Bar Association joined bar leaders across the world in calling for the closure of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a CBC report. “Few governmental operations by democratic countries have shown such a profound disrespect for the rule of law,” said CBA President Bernard Amyot. “Guantanamo Bay has come to signify injustice for some at the hands of the powerful.” The full statement from the bar presidents continues: “The rule of law – that everyone, including governments, is subject to the law, and that the law itself is fair and free from the influence of arbitrary power – has become an inconvenient afterthought.” According to the CBC article, Amyot repeated his call that Prime Minister Harper ask the U.S. government to transfer Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who is to be tried by a rigged Military Commission for his alleged actions in Afghanistan in 2001, into the custody of Canadian officials. Khadr has been detained at Guantanamo Bay for the past five years in conditions most observers agree amount to torture. The call to return Khadr to Canada has been taken up by all three opposition parties. “Admittedly, the Khadr family have [sic] emerged, as many have put it, as synonymous with terrorism," said Liberal MP Dominic LeBlanc during a press conference yesterday, as reported in the Globe and Mail. "But, the test of the rule of law is not its application in the easy cases, but its retention in the unpopular ones. Omar Khadr, a child victim, should now be afforded the justice denied him all these years, however unpopular and unpalatable his case may appear to be.” Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, Mr. Khadr's lead military defence attorney, said last month that, "It's difficult to see how Prime Minister Harper can defend the military commission as an ‘appropriate judicial process' when the U.S. refuses to let the leading international experts watch.” It would be an even more ridiculous statement for Harper to cling to now that the Pentagon official overseeing the Military Commission has resigned, as the Ottawa Citizen reported today, “just days after a published report alleged he’d insisted there be no acquittals.” Col. Morris Davis, who resigned as the commission’s chief prosecutor in October, recently interviewed William J. Haynes, general counsel at the U.S. defence department, for an article in The Nation magazine. According to the Citizen article, part of the interview went like this: “I said to (Haynes) that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process. At which point, his eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? . . . We’ve got to have convictions.’” The allegations leave little room for Harper to continue to back the Military Commission as a legitimate legal process that should be allowed to take its course, although the Prime Minister has proven his stubbornness on this and many other issues before. Click here to read an op-ed from June 2007 calling on the government to bring Khadr home, written by Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, Roch Tassé, coordinator of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, and Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada.
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