Omar Khadr's trial flouts international norms

There are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers around the world. Yet the trial of Omar Khadr is the first instance in modern history of a government prosecuting a former child soldier for war crimes.

At the age of 15, Omar was captured in Afghanistan after a four-hour firefight, and accused of throwing a grenade that killed an American soldier. He is now 23 and has spent a quarter of his life imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, incarcerated with adults and subjected to a range of unlawful interrogation techniques, including stress positions, extreme sleep deprivation, repeated threats of rape and three years of solitary confinement. The self-incriminatory evidence elicited from Omar while he was alone, terrified, deprived of legal representation and suffering physical and psychological abuse is currently being used against him at his trial.

The advent of lighter weapons like AK-47s, and the fact that children are cheaper to feed and more easily manipulated than adult combatants, has made them increasingly popular instruments of war in modern conflicts across Africa, South America and South Asia. There are 128 parties to the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict – including Canada and the US – and many of these countries have expended vast amounts of time and money ensuring that former child soldiers receive the psychiatric treatment and rehabilitative therapies they require to reintegrate with society. Child soldiers, even those who have killed dozens of people, are conventionally regarded as victims of a conflict rather than its perpetrators.

Why, then, is Omar Khadr being denied not only the same treatment as other child soldiers, but even the due process normally afforded to adult criminals? The government of his native Canada has hung him out to dry – far from seeking his repatriation as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms demands, it has spent over $1 million to ensure that he remained in Guantánamo. The USA treated Omar as an ‘intelligence treasure trove’ on the basis that his father was at one point close with Osama bin Laden – an Al Qaeda biography of the elder Khadr apparently applauds him for “tossing his little child in the furnace of the battle”. The message for child soldiers seems clear: kill as many villagers in Sierra Leone as you like, but harm an American soldier and no international law can protect you.