Abdullah Khadr walked out of a Toronto courtroom a free man Wednesday after an Ontario judge refused to extradite him to the United States to face terrorism charges.

“I think this is going to be a new beginning for me in life,” Khadr told reporters outside the court as his lawyers and family looked on.

Extradition orders to the U.S. are rarely denied, but Superior Court Justice Christopher Speyer ruled Wednesday that “this was an exceptional case on many levels.”

The 29-year-old Canadian has been held in Toronto jail since a Boston court indicted him on terrorism charges in December 2005. He is accused of supplying weapons to Al Qaeda when he lived in Pakistan following the 9/11 attacks.

The surprise decision focused on the fact that the U.S. paid Pakistan a $500,000 (U.S.) bounty for the Canadian’s arrest in Islamabad in 2004 and that Khadr was held for 14 months in what Speyer called an “illegal and arbitrary” detention.

Speyer wrote in his 62-page ruling that the human rights violations suffered by Khadr were “both shocking and unjustifiable.”

“The United States was the driving force behind Khadr’s capture and detention,” Speyer wrote. “The payment of the bounty heavily influenced the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency) to act in accordance with the United States agency’s wishes.”

Khadr claimed he was beaten during his first days of captivity and to stop the abuse he told his Pakistani interrogators what they wanted to hear, later repeating those claims for the U.S. and Canadian agents who followed.

Lawyers Nathan Whitling and Dennis Edney had argued that extraditing Khadr would mean Canada supports countries that violate international law since the case against the Canadian was based entirely on his statements.

When asked outside of court what he plans to do now, Khadr said, “I have no idea.”

“Thank you for everything, for the justice of the system,” he said. “I always believed it would happen one day and thank God it happened.”

The issues in Khadr’s case underscore the greater legal debate about the limits on interrogations, cooperation with countries with poor human rights records and the tension between intelligence-collection and criminal prosecution.

Speyer’s ruling comes just days before Khadr’s younger brother Omar is set to go on trial in Guantanamo, in an historic war crimes case that deals with many of the same legal challenges.

The Canadian children of reputed Al Qaeda financier Ahmed Said Khadr (who was killed by Pakistani forces in 2003), have always been considered high-value intelligence assets. Abduraham Khadr, the self-professed “black sheep” of the Khadr family and brother to Omar and Abdullah, worked as an informant for the CIA following his capture in Afghanistan in 2002.

Speyer wrote that the U.S. sought Abdullah Khadr for the intelligence purposes, not for criminal prosecution when detaining him in 2004.

But “in civilized democracies,” Speyer wrote, “the rule of law must prevail over intelligence objectives.”

And while Speyer said he found some of Khadr’s testimony was unreliable and was not satisfied there was evidence Khadr was tortured in Pakistan, he did believe he was beaten when captured and “subjected to other mistreatment.”

“When a U.S. government or any foreign government steps into a Canadian court they have to arrive with clean hands,” Edney said outside of court, saying he was “delighted” by the ruling.

“They can’t try to use evidence that is derived from the abuse of human beings and the judge saw that was an abuse of process and did the right thing.”

Federal government lawyer Howard Piafsky, who argued the Toronto case along with Matthew Sullivan on behalf of the U.S., said it was too early to decide whether they would appeal Speyer’s ruling.