BY JULIET O'NEILL, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE APRIL 14, 2010- A monitoring program aimed at protecting Canadian-transferred detainees from torture by Afghan authorities "broke down" not long after it was established in May 2007, diplomat Richard Colvin testified Tuesday at a public hearing by the Military Police Complaints Commission.
Colvin said very few of the more than 100 detainees captured by the Canadian military and transferred to Afghan control were visited by Foreign Affairs officials. And he said the reports of their interviews with detainees, recounting abuse, were circulated to "a handful of carefully selected" senior officials, mostly in Ottawa, who jealously guarded the information.
"The conclusion I came to was this was not a serious effort at monitoring," he said. "Torture continued."
Under questioning by commission counsel Ron Lunau, Colvin said it "would be logical" for Canadian provost marshals in Afghanistan, the officers in charge of Canada's military police, to have received e-mailed copies of those reports, although they were not named on the list of those to whom the reports were sent.
The commission is examining a complaint by Amnesty International and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association that provost marshals and military police -- who oversee detainee transfers -- "aided and abetted" the torture of detainees transferred to Afghan custody. They say transfers without torture safeguards could violate international humanitarian law.
Military police and military police investigators have testified this week and last that they never saw what Amnesty lawyer Paul Champ calls "the torture reports" submitted by Foreign Affairs officials -- some of which were released publicly after a 2007 Federal Court case in which Amnesty and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association tried to get an injunction against the transfers.
Earlier, recounting his efforts to draw attention to the risk of torture of Canadian-transferred Afghan detainees, Colvin said he had the sense that "you would find a lot of ugly things, creepy crawlies under the rock" when the controversy began to unfold on the public stage in 2007.
Colvin testified that the officer in charge of Canadian military police in Kandahar in 2006 had "explicit instructions" not to provide information about Afghan detainees captured by Canadians to the NATO-led military command.
