In 2008, the Global Report on Child Soldiers (produced by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers) identified 197 countries in which child soldiers were used from 2004 to 2007.

Who are child soldiers? The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict states that 18 is the minimum age of participation in armed conflict. Countries can accept volunteers as young as 16 but certain safeguards for recruitment apply.

Canadian citizen Omar Khadr was a child soldier. He has spent eight years in Guantanamo Bay vehemently protesting his innocence and stubbornly attempting to boycott his own trial.

Khadr pleaded guilty last week to all five charges against him, including that he threw the grenade that killed American Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer in 2002. Khadr was 15 years old at the time.

The confession is irrelevant to the real issues at stake in the case. Omar Khadr is just the latest victim in an imperfect system of international law that gives states a monopoly on violence and allows outsiders with complicated histories to fall through the cracks.

Khadr was recruited to a listed terrorist organization based on family ties and was put into action at the age of 15. This means the American military had two choices in how to proceed after his capture.

The first was to assist in the rehabilitation of Khadr, who is entitled to that under the internationally recognized Convention of the Rights of the Child (which both the United States and Canada, incidentally, have signed and ratified) due to the fact that he was an underage recruitment.

The second option was that he be tried as a war criminal under the domestic U.S. Military Commissions Act because he was not an enlisted soldier at the time he threw the grenade.

It seems obvious that there was only one real option.

“ The real crime here is not the action that killed Speer. It is the disgusting action of governments whose job it is to uphold human rights and the law

That’s why it is baffling that eight years later, Khadr is still in Guantanamo Bay and the international community has failed to see that they set a dangerous precedent in the future treatment of tens of thousands of other child soldiers who are participating in conflict around the world.

Child soldiers should not be held responsible for their actions. They are among the most highly vulnerable victims of conflict.

Without rehabilitation, they can be trapped in a circle of violence. It was hardly fair in recent weeks to hear Khadr referred to as a “radical jihadist” or “Al-Qaeda royalty” by the prosecution’s psychiatrists and right-wing Canadian columnists who are trying to make out him out as a bloodthirsty terrorist.

Khadr, like all child soldiers, deserves rehabilitation. His punishment at the hands of the American government, and his complete abandonment by the Canadian government, is so heartbreakingly shameful – and a blatant violation of international law – that we owe him not only his repatriation and rehabilitation, but an apology.

The real crime here is not the action that killed Speer. It is the disgusting action of governments whose job it is to uphold human rights and the law.

And they are the ones who should be investigated, not a former child soldier.

Devin Morrow is a University of Winnipeg graduate. She spent five months this year working with WUSC-Sri Lanka and UNICEF on a rehabilitation project for former child soldiers in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

Published in Volume 65, Number 10 of The Uniter (November 4, 2010)