Canada’s top military police officer should request an investigation by the RCMP into allegations Canadians committed war crimes in Afghanistan, a human rights lawyer says.
At the closing arguments of a hearing into complaints that Canada’s battlefield prisoners were abused when soldiers handed them to Afghan authorities in Kandahar, Amnesty International lawyer Paul Champ said military police charged with keeping Canada on the right side of international law were intimidated and marginalized by senior commanders into ignoring the torture allegations.
His recommendation Wednesday to the Military Police Complaints Commission, was that the Canadian Forces Provost Marshall ask the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to look into the long-standing allegations that Canadians were complicit in torture.
Champ said this is crucial to “restore public confidence” in the Canadian military.
The Canadian Forces have been fending off the complaints of human rights groups for years in parliamentary inquiries, the Federal Court of Canada and at the hearings of the military watchdog, which began over a year ago.
Both the Conservative government and numerous military commanders have argued that the absence of specific evidence of torture in Afghanistan prevented them from halting detainee handovers. On three occasions when there was credible evidence, the military said it halted transfers until conditions in Afghan prisons improved.
A government lawyer counselled commissioners hearing the complaint to stick to their narrow mandate of judging the action of eight military police officers who are the subject of the allegations.
“The true question before you is did all of these military police officers miss something? Was there evidence of the commission of a criminal offence before them,” Elizabeth Richards asked. “We say that the answer is overwhelmingly no.”
Champ said that military police officers have a responsibility to prosecute battlefield crimes as well as to prevent them and should have investigated the condition of detainees in Afghan custody based on the rampant rumours among deployed soldiers that conditions were poor and abuse was well known.
But he said testimony showed that military police were viewed as a “hindrance” in Kandahar and were marginalized by top Canadian commanders intent on carrying out the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
There weren’t made aware of Foreign Affairs reports that detainees were alleging abuse and they weren’t keen to probe those allegations when they did come to light, Champ said.
“It seems the MPs themselves felt there were questions they shouldn’t ask. There were questions that were uncomfortable or inconvenient,” Champ said.
He even cited the testimony of Navy Capt. Sean Moore the Canadian Forces Provost Marshall at the time of the complaints saying that the extent of the detainee problem “crystalized” around February 2007.
Following that, Moore said he made discrete inquiries of his deployed counterparts and with former commanders who had complete their mission, but he never sought government reports on the matter, saying that it “would have been regarded as an intrusion by the chain of command.”
“In our submission, that’s not a good excuse,” said Champ. “Police officers are supposed to ask those uncomfortable questions.”
The human rights lawyer said testimony heard by the military police watchdog pointed to a “systemic problem” where the upholders of law and order on the battlefield didn’t feel sufficiently independent and were too deferential to their military superiors.
While military police, like their civilian counterparts, have “discretion” not to probe possible breaches of the law, that power is diminished when the most severe allegations arise.
Torture allegations “diminishes or eliminates” that discretion and military police officers should acted based on either hearsay from other soldiers around Kandahar Airfield, the notoriety of the Afghan secret police, or newspaper reports which featured interviews with Afghans who said they’d been picked up by Canadian soldiers and then abused by their Afghan jailors.
But military police were reluctant to second guess Canadian commanders who maintained that there was no direct evidence of torture, and so there was no need to either halt transfers or launch an investigation.
Champ said there was also a keen awareness that substantiating detainee abuse allegations would have been seen as a “strategic failure” for the Canadian Forces and would have undermined the military mission.
“The police officers here felt constrained by their role as members of the military,” he said.
The government’s closing arguments continue Wednesday afternoon.