WASHINGTON -- Human rights groups reacted with alarm Monday to President-elect Barack Obama's intent to wait more than 100 days before emptying the prison camps at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and urged him either way to swiftly halt the looming war crimes trial of a Canadian child soldier.

Obama told ABC News Sunday that closing the controversial camps would be complicated. Legal experts, he said, are consulting on how to close the camps that today confine 250 foreign men without risking U.S. national security.

By Monday Obama's transition team said in an anonymous leak to the Associated Press that Obama was preparing to issue an executive order for closing the detention center in his first week in office. However, no closing of Guantánamo is likely soon, with aides saying the executive order would begin the process.

Both Obama and Republican rival John McCain had campaigned on a promise to close the detention center as a way of restoring U.S. standing globally. Obama has not said since his election what he would do about the controversial post-9/11 war court, or commissions, where 18 of the 250 detainees face special trials.

''Restoring our commitment to the rule of law cannot be put on the back burner,'' countered Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Reached by The Miami Herald, Romero called the AP leak ''welcome news'' but said the president-elect's team had yet to disclose ``the details, the timeline and the overall plan for shuttering the military commissions and ending Bush's policies of indefinite detention.''

The Pentagon has scheduled the trial of Omar Khadr, 22, for Jan. 26 and is planning to airlift a jury pool of senior U.S. officers to the remote Navy base soon after Obama takes the oath of office. Reporters are being brought down in advance, for pre-trial hearings that straddle Inauguration Day.

Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces sergeant, Christopher Speer, during a July 2002 U.S. raid and firefight on a suspected al Qaeda compound near Khost, Afghanistan.

''We urge that upon taking office, you act quickly to suspend the military commissions, drop the military commission charges against Khadr, and either repatriate him for rehabilitation in Canada or transfer him to federal court and prosecute him in accordance with international juvenile justice and fair trial standards,'' said the joint letter.

It was signed by Amnesty International, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and the Coalition to Stop the U.S. of Child Soldiers.

Also Monday, the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia wrote a petition-style letter to Obama urging him to dismiss the Khadr charges, citing allegations of abuse as well as the Canadian's youth at the time of his capture.

''Omar's imminent trial threatens to undermine your courageous commitment to both close Guantánamo and restore the rule of law,'' said the open letter signed by some 350 children's and human rights activists, scholars, advocates plus legal defense groups and law clinics.

Child rights advocates argue that the Toronto-born Khadr should never have been handled like other Guantánamo captives -- since he was captured at age 15 and had been sent as a child by his father to al Qaeda training in Afghanistan, rather than volunteering.

His military attorney says he was captured, unconscious, in the firefight with two bullet wounds that tore through his back and out his chest, saved by U.S. medics and woke after surgery to find himself being interrogated in Bagram, Afghanistan.

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