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Former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr cannot avoid a huge civil judgment against him by recanting the confession and guilty plea he made before an American military commission, lawyers acting for the widow of a U.S. special forces soldier argue in new court filings.

Canadian courts must accept the agreed statement of facts that underpinned Khadr’s war-crimes conviction in 2010, they argue, regardless of whether he lied under oath when he admitted to tossing a hand grenade that killed the soldier eight years earlier.

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“No court anywhere, either in Canada or the U.S., has found the (agreed statement) specifically was involuntary or the product of coercion,” the lawyers state in their filing last month. “A sworn confession is not lightly ignored, particularly when (Khadr) benefited significantly from it in terms of a plea agreement resulting in a reduced sentence and the eligibility to be commuted back to Canada.”