Madam Speaker, I rise this evening to follow-up on a question I asked on November 30 of the Minister of Foreign Affairs regarding the number of visits that Canadian officials made to Afghan prisons since the 2007 agreement was made. It was the new and improved agreement with the Afghan government as to the handling of detainees and a supposedly robust monitoring program.
I asked the minister whether or not the government was prepared to release the reports of those visits. We still have the Afghan independent human rights commission and the United States state department saying that torture still remains commonplace in the prisons of Afghanistan. We continue to need confidence that we are not violating international law in this matter. We are asking that the government make those reports public. I think the question was whether it will continue to claim that everything is all right without revealing any facts.
In response, the government responded similarly to the way it has in the past. The government has been obfuscating on this issue. That does not have anything to do with hockey or skating. It has to do with pretending to answer the question but in fact not. It talks about improvements to human rights in Afghanistan. I do not want to hear about that, although I know a lot of effort has been made to try to improve human rights in Afghanistan.
I would like to know whether or not the government is going to release these reports and have the kind of transparency that other countries have in dealing with this issue. Frankly, we are not satisfied that the kind of monitoring that would be expected and needed is in fact taking place. The special committee on Afghanistan has had some witnesses before it, talking about the new system and the improvements that were made.
However, we are learning that, when Canadian officials find that something is going wrong, all they do is tell the authorities in Afghanistan. They do not actually do an investigation of their own. For example, in November 2007, after hearing half a dozen people or so talk about how they were tortured or ill-treated in the prison, describing issues related to being beaten with cables, et cetera, they discovered in the investigator's office of the prison a wire cable that they then reported to the authorities in Afghanistan. This particular investigator was fired as a result.
If that was there in November 2007 and the individuals were complaining about being beaten with wire cables, surely there is some connection between one and the other. When dealing with law, it is called corroboration. Yet, the government maintains that it had no proof of any individual Afghan detainee being tortured. That is not good enough. That is not the issue that has to be answered first of all. The main issue is whether there was a risk of torture and if Canadians passed over Afghan detainees to that real risk of torture.
I do not think the government is answering the question. Information has come out today. The Canadian Press as well as the CBC are reporting issues that confirm Mr. Colvin's concerns that ordinary people, who Canadian generals and military officers describe as local yokels, were being passed over and that the monitoring was not adequate. Will the government release those reports so we can have transparency on this issue?