Madam Speaker, I want to start off by sharing with members of the House some of the information to which we have had access.
The debate today is around access to information, so that we can actually get to the bottom of what is happening, and perhaps is happening, with regard to the transfer of detainees from Canadian Forces to Afghan authorities.
One of the things that has been available to members of Parliament and the public is testimony from the Federal Court. I am going to be reading into the record some of the evidence that was provided during a testimony cross-examination of Kerry Buck, of course, a government official.
The questions were regarding what was happening on the ground in terms of investigation and follow-up. One of the challenges in this debate has been trying to figure out who is responsible for what, and most of the thrust of Mr. Colvin's message was trying to figure out what the roles of each of the institutions were: Canadian Forces, DFAIT, et cetera.
In this testimony, that is available and it is not censored, there was a question from the lawyer to Ms. Buck, asking:
In the next bullet he says [the detainee] that he was hit on the feet with a cable or a big wire and forced to stand for two days but that's all and he showed the Canadian officials a mark on the back of his ankle which he said is from the cable?
Ms. Buck answered:
Yes, that's the allegation.
The lawyer then asked:
Has that allegation been investigated? Do you know?
This is where it is important. Ms. Buck said that they really were not responsible for investigating.
We have heard time and time again from the government that there is not one scintilla of evidence that a detainee who was passed on from Canadian Forces to Afghan officials was tortured. The problem, and we see this in testimony here that I am reading into the record, is that there was no follow-up because the role was this. The Canadian Forces passed on detainees to the Afghan officials. After that, there was no investigation of allegations. In fact, it was reliant upon the Afghanistan independent human rights commission and the Red Cross to do that.
Here is where it gets interesting. When we have testimony of marks and individuals making allegations about being beaten, et cetera, there is an attempt to find out who is responsible. The government agrees that there are allegations and it claims that none of these allegations were ever proven, but it begs this question. If there were allegations, who was following up? If it was not a Canadian official, then obviously Canada will not know what is happening.
The question then is, who was doing it? We find out that there was no connection between the Canadian government and the follow-up to any investigations. I will just give a bit of the record to underline what I am saying.
Ms. Buck said:
Allegations are allegations. Some will be valid, some will not be valid.
At least she acknowledged that some of the allegations could be true. The question posed to Ms. Buck then was:
But we don't make any of our own independent assessment of the potential strength of the allegations?
Here is the answer. She said:
We don't. It's not our role. It's not our role.
The question then was:
It's not our role to determine whether there might be some kind of risk that detainees are being tortured?
The answer was:
No, it's our role to determine risk, but it is not our role to determine credibility of the allegations, to determine veracity of the allegations. We don't investigate those allegations. We record them.
The problem with that is the following. If we look at the evidence that we have available, we have the ICRC, and there have been articles written about this, having met with Canadian officials, saying, “You have a problem with the transfer process”.
It was not referring to the fact that detainees were passed over. It was what happened to them after, and the follow-up and the investigative procedure. We have Ms. Buck saying, for the record that they do not do that.
Mr. Colvin was saying at the same time that there was a problem, which he said in one of the memos that we did get, which was highly redacted and goes to April 2007. He said, “The position of the Red Cross is that each nation has international legal obligations regarding the transfer of detainees”.
What that means is not simply that we have a legal obligation to say we have handed them over, but to follow-up. This is where there has been a black hole. The government has always said there is no proof of any detainees being tortured. That was blown out of the water yesterday, but Conservatives continued down this path of basically saying that once we hand them over we are not responsible.
Some of the memos indicate that there was a debate, and this is reading the tea leaves, between DFAIT and Canadian Forces as to who was responsible once those detainees were handed over. I am reading a redacted memo from Mr. Colvin which said: “However, I would like to note that the ambassador remains strongly of the view that initial notification should be of handing over detainees should be by Canadian Forces and that secondly, notification of the Red Cross and the Afghan independent human rights commission should be sent as soon as an Afghan detainee is detained by Canadian Forces, not only in connection with his transfer to the government of Afghanistan custody. This would serve two important purposes. One is that it would underline DND's ownership of detention and DFAIT would assume responsibility for follow-up once a detainee is transferred to the government of Afghanistan”.
Here we have the debate Mr. Colvin has laid out of who was responsible. Was it Canadian Forces? Was it DFAIT? The generals and General Hillier, et cetera, all said that once they were handed over it was not their role any more. The soldiers who were writing in the field, and we heard from the Chief of the Defence Staff yesterday, said they were worried about handing them over because of what would happen. They said not only what would happen to this one particular detainee but it had happened before. So they did due diligence. They did their job. They took pictures. They wrote notes.
However, what we have here is the gap that there was no process to follow-up. The debate was saying whose role was it after a detainee had been handed over? Why were they concerned? Because as we have gone over many times, the Red Cross, the Afghan independent human rights commission, the state department, our own human rights reports done by DFAIT, all said there were problems with torture in Afghan jails. There were extrajudicial killings. The soldiers knew that. We had evidence yesterday from the Chief of the Defence Staff who said in the notes that were handed over: “Overhearing Afghan officials saying they were going to kill one of the detainees”.
The problem was obvious to everyone. The issue was, what did the government do about it? In this memo that was not highly redacted says there was a debate. Who was responsible? Colvin's note said that initially it was the Canadian Forces, after that it was the DFAIT officials. What we have though from Ms. Buck, what I already read into the record, is that we were not responsible for investigating after. There is a huge hole here.
Under international law, we are obligated to follow-up if there is a risk or a probability. That is very clear. So we need from the government all of the evidence.
It leads to my final statement on this and I will sum up, how can we trust the government with the present detainee transfer agreement, which I have concerns about in terms of investigation, et cetera? If we know before that the government was not investigating when it knew there was torture and there were international law obligations. From all the data in the redacted censored documents we have, there was a debate and a concern within departments, by the Red Cross and others. Conservatives seem to have ignored it.
Finally, we call on the government not only to bring forward these documents so we can have an actual overview of this without all the censoring but we need to obviously have an inquiry. If it is not able to do that, then it has lost the trust of this Parliament to actually be upfront and we remain concerned about the present agreement.