The UN report found what it called strong evidence of torture or ill-treatment by Afghan police in several districts of Kandahar province, a hotbed of the Taliban insurgency. Canadian soldiers and police mentoring teams operated in the province until last July, when all combat forces were withdrawn. For years, they routinely handed over suspects to the Afghans despite persistent allegations that they faced torture and other abuse.
Over the years of its combat mission, hundreds of detainees were transferred by Canada to Afghan detention facilities and prisons, including those where the UN investigators found torture to have occurred, according to Amir Attaran, the University of Ottawa law professor who first raised the alarm about Canada’s role in shifting prisoners to the Afghans in 2007. “Now that the UN reports and NATO agree that the Afghans keep torturing, Canada is lawfully obliged to demand its detainees be returned and relocated in a safe prison,” he said. “The U.S. already has its own prison for this reason and if Canada does not act similarly, then our officials and soldiers risk prosecution for war crimes.”
The United Nations study, however, suggested that people handed over to the Afghans by Canadians have been handled differently in the past year than those detained by Afghan or other NATO forces.
In one case cited in the report, a man recounted how he had been beaten and kicked for days in the custody of internal security officers. Everyone arrested by Afghan intelligence officers had similar experiences, unless they had been arrested by Canadians, the man is quoted as saying. “For those arrested by Canadians, two [intelligence] officials were allocated for further interrogation and those interrogated by them never complained about ill treatment.”
