WASHINGTON - Senator Romeo Dallaire is urging America's president-elect to release Omar Khadr to Canada and recognize that his imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay has been a human rights violation, arguing that Khadr was a child soldier whose detention is against international law.
  
"We've got a Canadian citizen who at the age of 15 was shot up and involved in a conflict as a child soldier and has been sitting in an American jail," Dallaire told a D.C. news conference on Monday, just two weeks before Khadr's trial is scheduled to begin in Guantanamo Bay.

Dallaire, the revered retired general who oversaw the UN's peacekeeping missions during the Rwandan genocide, said he was in Washington to appeal to Barack Obama to release Khadr, now 22, into Canadian custody so that he can be rehabilitated as a former child soldier.

His hand has been forced, Dallaire said, by the inaction of the Canadian government on the case of the country's only Guantanamo detainee.

"The reason I'm down here is because I've gotten nowhere with the Canadian government," said a visibly annoyed Dallaire. He suggested that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's refusal to get involved in the Khadr case has been "unstatesmanlike."
 
Dallaire said he tried to convince U.S. Congress in August that Khadr should be returned to Canada. But his attempt to convince Harper to press the Americans to send Khadr home "has been to no avail."

"I am here again today to try to convince the transition team and your president-elect to offer up Khadr to the Canadian government," Dallaire said.

"Why should you get involved in a process that is inappropriate and against rule of law? Why drag you into this, when in fact Canada should be taking responsibility and sorting it out themselves?"

Khadr -- the son of alleged al-Qaida figure Ahmed Said Khadr, who died in a raid in Pakistan in 2003 -- is accused of killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade during a battle in Afghanistan. He was seriously wounded in the 2002 incident.

Dallaire was joined at the news conference by human rights activists, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone and a child psychiatrist as they discussed what they called "the scourge" of using boys and girls as agents of war.

"No child has the criminal intent to commit a war crime," said David Crane, a law professor who was once the chief prosecutor of the Sierra Leone International War Crimes Tribunal.

While it was in progress, five human rights groups -- the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch -- publicized a letter urging Obama to stop Khadr's Guantanamo Bay trial.

The letter says the charge should either be dropped against Khadr and he should either be repatriated to Canada, or, if there's evidence to support the charge, prosecuted in U.S. federal courts.

Both Dallaire and human rights groups argue there's broad global recognition that the use of children in armed conflicts is a serious abuse. They point out that no existing international tribunal has ever prosecuted a child for war crimes.

Obama has raised doubt about the future of the war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo. He has pledged to close the military prison, though he has not disclosed how he will handle prosecuting the terror suspects housed there.

In an interview with ABC on Sunday, Obama backed away from setting a timetable on closing Guantanamo, calling the issue a "challenge."

"It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize," he said.

But Dallaire argued Obama would be lightening his burden by returning Khadr to Canada.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it is to the benefit of this country, to your new president, that in fact this case is given to the appropriate authorities, and that is the Canadian government," he said.

"If we take Omar Khadr back, we take one of Obama's problems away. I mean, we alleviate the situation for him where he doesn't have to look at a case of a Canadian child soldier being prosecuted in a process that is considered to be inappropriate."

Harper has been firm in his position not to intervene in Khadr's case, saying a judicial process is underway.