Thank you, Mr. Bachand.
I had only heard very briefly about the questions in the House today. However, I do have some information or knowledge about the issue of prisons in Afghanistan.
I have heard through the litigation in the United Kingdom that there was an issue in 2009 where the national directorate of security refused access to the Netherlands, Britain, and Canada for a period of time, and that one concern was that the chief of the NDS, Mr. Saleh, was saying you promised you were going to build us a prison, and until you follow through with that promise, we're not letting you have access. I reviewed one document related to that litigation, where it also appears that President Karzai was backing the chief of the national directorate of security.
It could well be that this was an incident Mr. MacKay was referring to in November 2009. If you recall, Mr. MacKay did say that there were three suspensions in 2009. He said two were with respect to new allegations of abuse, and one other suspension was due to the national directorate of security barring access, so he may well have been referring to that. As I understood it, transfers are ongoing, so presumably this issue has been resolved, but it's troubling that we had no idea that was ongoing at the time.
There's another issue out of that as well, as has been reported by The Globe and Mail this morning—and I've seen other documents corroborating it—that there were discussions in 2006 to have a joint detention facility co-managed by the Afghan authorities as well as NATO forces. I have a document from March 2006 in the United Kingdom, which puts forward that proposal and says:
This proposal would be beneficial, because it would retain an Afghan face, it would lend greater confidence to meeting international obligations, and invest in Afghan infrastructure to create a lasting capability that could continue to operate when international forces withdraw.
And then it says:
This proposal is meeting a resistance from the Canadian and the Dutch.
So we don't know why that occurred.
In cross-examining Ms. Colleen Swords, the ADM for the Department of Foreign Affairs, in 2007 I heard something about this proposal. We learned that there was some discussion about a co-managed facility, but we don't know why Canada ultimately opposed that. This has been the proposal that my clients have been suggesting for a very long time, to ensure that Canada is meeting its international obligations.
On your last point, about the United States State Department report, which was just released a few days ago, unfortunately those kinds of comments or statements about the risk of torture in Afghanistan have been the same in their reports for several years. I can tell you that I've seen some of Canada's own comparable reports from the Department of Foreign Affairs. They were disclosed to us in the litigation, and for several years running they were also very similar, where Canadian reports were saying that “torture is all too common”--that was a Canadian phrase, “all too common”--in facilities. We have no reason to believe that the situation has improved in Afghan prisons. We have no evidence of that.
I can tell you I'm aware of another report in the summer of 2009 by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission called “Causes of torture in law enforcement institutions”. That was a very scientific study by the commission of individuals in Afghan detention. They interviewed 400 individuals, and of those over 90% claimed that they had been abused or tortured in Afghan custody.
So based on that evidence, and also what we've heard—that Canadian diplomats have received new allegations of abuse, apparently, according to Minister MacKay, in 2009—in the face of all that overwhelming evidence, according to the legal test of risk of torture, I can't see how the Canadian Forces can continue making transfers in the manner that respects international law.