Omar Khadr should be released from detention because the Canadian government is illegally imprisoning him as an adult for actions he committed as a youth, his lawyer says.

An application challenging the former Guantanamo Bay detainee’s imprisonment was filed in Alberta, where Khadr is being held in the maximum-security Edmonton Institution.

“This government needs to be made accountable for its mistreatment of Omar Khadr when in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Canada,” his lawyer Dennis Edney said in a written statement to the Star. “It continues to abuse him in Canada by locking him away, in a maximum-security prison, as an adult, instead of being treated as a youth.”

The government has not yet filed a response to the application, filed to Edmonton Institution warden Kelly Hartle on Thursday, but Canada’s Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney said in a statement Tuesday afternoon: “The Government of Canada will vigorously defend against any attempted court action to lessen his punishment for these crimes.”

Khadr, who will turn 27 next month, was transferred to Canada in September after spending a decade in Guantanamo Bay. His repatriation was part of a Pentagon plea deal reached in October 2010: Khadr pleaded guilty and was convicted for five military commission offences, including “murder in the violation of war” for the death of U.S. soldier Christopher Speer, and was sentenced to eight years. A military jury later handed down a sentence of 40 years — which was merely symbolic as Khadr was entitled to the terms of his plea deal.

He was transferred to Edmonton earlier this year after receiving death threats at Ontario’s Millhaven Institute. A month later, he was assaulted in the Edmonton facility but not seriously injured.

Edney is arguing in what’s known as an application for habeas corpus that Canada did not appropriately apply the provisions of the International Transfer of Offenders Act to Khadr’s case.

Khadr was 15 when he was shot and captured by a team of U.S. special forces in Afghanistan during the July 2002 battle that fatally wounded Speer. In addition to murder, the U.S. charged him with attempted murder, conspiracy, providing material support to terrorism and spying.

Offenders under the age of 18 face different sentencing guidelines and protections in Canada, under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. If Khadr had committed those five offences in Canada, “an eight-year sentence could only have been imposed as a youth sentence,” not as an adult sentence, the brief states.

Under those circumstances, according to the federal transfer act, Khadr “may only be held in a provincial correctional facility for adults,” not in federal maximum security institutions such as Millhaven and Edmonton, Edney argues.

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A July letter to Edney from the Justice Department, written on behalf of Corrections Canada and Hartle, may offer some clues as to the government’s position on the case. Khadr is “deemed to be serving an adult sentence for his four sentences other than the murder conviction,” Justice Department lawyer Kanchana Fernando wrote in the letter obtained by the Star. “As such . . . he is appropriately held at a (federal) penitentiary.”

The letter does not address the issue of the murder conviction, which comes with a minimum life sentence in Canada.

Edney writes in the habeas application that the government is relying upon a “fictional basis that the global eight-year sentence imposed in (Guantanamo) was actually five separate concurrent sentences of eight years each.”

A spokeswoman for Corrections Canada said she could not comment on the case, citing privacy laws.