Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  He was there before 2002. The facts are opaque here. His location during the period 2001 through the summer of 2002 is not publicly available. He was certainly there, however, earlier than 2002.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  These are factual questions that really you have to pose to the U.S. authorities, who apparently are in possession of all sorts of information that we don't have. Our information is dependent entirely on the public record. That public record is relatively thin and comes from journalistic sources.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Again, that's not a question we can answer definitively. That's a question to ask the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. Keep in mind that the Anti-terrorism Act came into force in December of 2001. Any act that would be prosecutable under that Anti-terrorism Act would have to take place after December of 2001.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  We know that he was recruited. We suspect from certain video information that's been released that he was involved in the development of improvised explosive devices. There have been allegations made by the United States about the level of involvement. There's a charge sheet that's been made publicly available.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  As I explained before, there is no contradiction. There is a definition of “state” in the Foreign Enlistment Act that's extremely broad. It covers off entities that purport to be the governing authority not of a country but of a particular region. It's an extremely broad definition.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Maybe I could make one other observation. The first thing is that we agree with you completely that repatriation doesn't equal impunity. It's not that Mr. Khadr will be repatriated and there will be no prospect of criminal charges or other measures being taken against him. I know that parlance has been out there.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Do you want to deal with that, Andrew?

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Just to reiterate, the definitions vary. The definitions under the Foreign Enlistment Act are a much broader definition of state than the more intuitive meaning we find under the Criminal Code. So we're four-square with the law. It may not make a lot of sense in terms of logic, but we lie within the definitions that are found within these laws, so that apparent inconsistency really doesn't exist, in our view.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Can I circle back to complexity and then address the comparative child soldier issue? Just on complexity, if your standard of complexity is that the prosecution in Canada would be complex because of all these variables my team has been describing versus what goes on in a military commission, the answer is yes, of course, because the military commission has pared away complexity by ignoring the child soldier issue and by allowing the admissibility of evidence obtained through cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I don't purport to have any privileged insight into what animates the Government of Canada. I can say that there's a certain investment in the current policy. There's been inertia for a number of years now, and that inertia tends to continue just by nature of consistency. I will say that I agree with you that there are extremely important implications at play in relation to Omar Khadr.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I have no doubt that the notoriety of the family has tainted the case, to the extent that he has been an extremely unpopular figure who is very divisive. The level of vitriol that one sees, for example, when Omar Khadr stories appear in The Globe and Mail in those commentaries that people can enter....

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Sean, would you like to take a shot?

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'd be prepared and content to go to court and argue that the omission--that is, the failure to intervene in these circumstances--would violate the Charter of Rights.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Do you mind if I respond in English?

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Let me take a stab at it. The first thing to note is from the juxtaposition of the Canadian response to the incarceration of a citizen at Guantanamo with those of our allies. Omar Khadr is the only western national still in custody in Guantanamo Bay, as you know. In the first half of the report, we walk through the nationalities of those who have been released and try to document as well as we can what has happened to them.