Faced with new evidence of torture by Afghan police and security forces, NATO’s top commander has ordered an immediate halt to detainee transfers, a controversial practice for Canadian and other foreign contingents for years.
The order – only days before the publication of another report, this one from the United Nations, which is expected to detail brutal and systemic torture in Afghan prisons – comes after years of denials from Canada and other Western governments that they were complicit in subjecting detainees to torture.
Tuesday’s order from U.S. General John Allen blacklists a half-dozen prisons run by Afghan police and the country’s notorious NDS, the National Directorate of Security. NATO had already banned transfers in July to Afghan authorities in Kandahar, the strife-torn province where Canadian troops captured scores of detainees during the years they were deployed.
“With appropriate caution, ISAF [NATO’s International Security and Assistance Force] has taken the prudent measure to suspend detainee transfer to certain facilities until we can verify the observations of a pending UNAMA [UN Mission in Afghanistan] report,” a NATO official told the BBC, which first reported the transfer halt.
Canada was first faced with evidence that its transfer policy put prisoners at risk of torture in a series of Globe and Mail articles in 2007. Ottawa belatedly added follow-up inspections which – in at least one case – resulted in a transferred detainee showing inspectors the torture implements hidden in his cell. Transfers were temporarily stopped and later limited to certain prisons.
Under a revised transfer agreement and subsequent revelations by Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin, Ottawa limited transfers to selected NDS prisons in Kabul and Kandahar but insisted throughout that detainees it turned over to Afghan authorities weren’t tortured or abused.
The Harper government censored reports by its own diplomats detailing torture and abuse in Afghan prisons, even though the findings matched those of other governments, the UN and human rights organizations.
Afghan “military, intelligence and police forces have been accused of involvement in arbitrary arrest, kidnapping extortion, torture and extrajudicial killing” was the censored assessment of Canadian diplomats in 2006, the first full year of Canadian detainee handovers in Kandahar.
Ottawa also fought for years to limit and censor release of documents detailing follow-up inspections and initially denied that – on at least one occasion – Canadian soldiers had rescued a transferred detainee after they discovered him being tortured.
Although the government pulled Canadian soldiers out of fighting roles in Kandahar in July, prisoners captured by the Canadian contingent were transferred in the period covered by the forthcoming UN report.
Various human rights groups have issued horrific accounts of the torture of detainees transferred by Western armies.
“By transferring individuals to locations where they are at grave risk of torture and other ill-treatment, ISAF states may be complicit in this treatment, and are breaching their international legal obligations,” warned an Amnesty International report in 2007. It called then for a halt to all transfers.
