One of the sad byproducts of our present political moment is that we have allowed our most basic rights to become the subject of a political tug of war. Rather than keeping our political discussions to how to best interpret and apply the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and other Canadian laws, we have moved into dangerous territory where we can rightly wonder whether our rights will be upheld at all.

For that, we can thank Omar Khadr and Stephen Harper, the alleged al-Qaeda child soldier and the prime minister who has chosen to ignore a 9-0 Supreme Court decision that found Canada complicit in breaking Khadr's Charter rights.

The Court decided that: "The interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel, to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects."

However, it stopped short of forcing the government to repatriate Khadr.

Our Prime Minister, through his spokesman Dmitri Soudas, decided that "there's no shift in Canadian policy on this," meaning that Canada will continue to allow Khadr to languish in Guantanamo.

"Their ruling said we get to decide and we're saying that Mr. Khadr faces serious charges on a wide range of things. . . . It's under the American administration's purview right now to pursue with the court case."

Rather than bringing Khadr back to Canada and unwinding his immensely complicated case through our court system, Harper has chosen the easy way out to the detriment of every Canadian's freedoms.

While it is certainly true that Khadr faces extremely serious allegations, that is also the case for thousands of other Canadians each year.

Whether they are drunk drivers, murderers, thieves or rapists, we do not interrogate them after they have been softened up through torture, and we do not participate in frontier justice or show trials.

Khadr was captured in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002 after a firefight during which U.S. soldier Christopher Speer was fatally wounded by a grenade that the Pentagon alleges Khadr threw.

He was 15 years old when the Americans first captured him, and he has been held without trial ever since, first at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan where he alleges that he was tortured through beatings, sleep depravation and threats with dogs, and later in Guantanamo Bay, where Canadian interrogators knowingly took advantage of a sleep-deprived Khadr while interrogating him in 2003 and 2004.

His future fate is unknown, as the Americans continue to grapple with George W. Bush's decision to set up a legal black hole in Guantanamo.

Presently, Khadr is scheduled to face "trial" in front of a U.S. military commission, a special court system devised specifically for Guantanamo detainees.

He is the only remaining western national in American custody, after other countries, including Australia and Great Britain, repatriated their nationals long ago either because they were mistreated, or because they feared that they could not get a fair trial in the U.S.

Canada -- under both Harper and Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin -- chose a different path, one that has led us to the present situation where our government has been found by the Supreme Court to have grievously violated a citizen's Charter rights. And rather than arguing about taxation, criminal justice or social policy, we get to argue about what to do when our government knowingly takes advantage of the torture of one of our fellow citizens and refuses to do anything about it.

As long as Canada's government -- Conservative, Liberal, or otherwise -- allows Khadr to face Guantanamo justice, it devalues everyone's rights. No matter what colour your skin is, what god you pray to or which party you vote for, you carry the same passport as Khadr, issued and backed by the same authority.

Following the Supreme Court's decision, a Montreal Gazette editorial put it best: "the court determined that our government has deprived a Canadian citizen of his Charter rights, and if that can happen to one Canadian, it can happen to any Canadian."

So, what are we going to do about it?

Kris Kotarski is a graduate of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary. kk otarski@gmail.com

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