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More than 20 months after it first promised full co-operation, the Harper government has moved to block public hearings into whether it ordered Canadian soldiers to transfer prisoners to Afghan security forces knowing the detainees would likely be tortured.

Only weeks before the long-delayed hearings were to begin, government lawyers want the Federal Court to outlaw them, saying the independent Military Police Complaints Commission can investigate only specific and individual instances of tortured prisoners, not whether all prisoners faced the risk of torture.

Commission chairman Peter Tinsley ordered the public hearings last spring, saying he was left with no other choice. “Ordering a public interest hearing is necessary to ensure a full investigation of the grave allegations,” Mr. Tinsley said. Since then, he has rolled multiple allegations covering different time periods into a single public-interest investigation.

Hearings were to start Dec. 4.

“It's troubling and disappointing, but not at all surprising, that the government is again trying to obstruct the holding of a public hearing,” said Alex Neve, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada. “They are always looking for ways to avoid transparency and accountability.”

Ministers and senior military officers initially promised co-operation with the MPCC investigation into allegations that transferred prisoners were being tortured. But the government has now twice launched court actions seeking to derail public hearings.

“There is no refusal to co-operate,” Prime Minster Stephen Harper told the House of Commons last spring, when his government was accused of stalling on the delivery of documents to the MPCC, the independent body set up after the last torture scandal involving Canadian soldiers – the abuse and killing of a defenceless Somali teenager in 1993.

The MPCC “will get the co-operation with respect both to information disclosures and the funding necessary to have a full-blown hearing,” Defence Minister Peter Mackay said.

But after the MPCC announced that public hearings would begin next month, the government was faced with the possibility that senior military officers might be called to testify about the origins of government policy ordering soldiers to turn all prisoners over to Afghan security forces.

Turning prisoners over to known torturers or to those who would abuse them is a war crime, under the Geneva Conventions.

Justice Department lawyers filed an application Oct. 30, seeking a Federal Court order “prohibiting the chairperson [of the MPCC] and the commission from investigating” the allegations.

The MPCC “is in fact attempting to review policy decisions made by governmental officials in relation to the transfer of Afghan detainees by the Canadian Forces to Afghan authorities,” which, the government asserts, “falls outside of the confines of the mandate” of the MPCC, the government's filing says.

Yet the MPCC was created in the wake of the Somalia scandal in part because the government of the day shut down a public inquiry just as it was delving into the role of the senior government officials and military officers. The MPCC was established to investigate systemic failings as well as individual transgressions of military police.

The government is seeking a Federal Court order that the MPCC can neither investigate nor hold hearings into allegations that transferred prisoners were tortured and that senior government officials and military officers knew it would happen.

Government censors have blacked out key passages of secret documents that showed that ministers knew that torture was rife in Afghan prisons.

They also have blacked out details of torture allegedly administered personally by Asadullah Khalid, the governor of Kandahar province and a key Canadian ally.

While there were several instances of ordinary Canadian soldiers and junior officers refusing to turn over prisoners to Afghan police or army units because they feared the detainees would be killed or tortured, senior officers and ministers long maintained that adequate safeguards were in place.

“The problem lies at the higher levels of the Canadian forces and the Canadian government,” Paul Champ, the Ottawa lawyer representing Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, the original complainants to the MPCC, said yesterday.

Then, a year ago, during a follow-up inspection, a transferred detainee showed Canadian officials the location of the electrical cables his Afghan guards used to torture him. All transfers were immediately stopped, but the government kept that fact secret for months. The prisoner transfers were resumed and Ottawa said it had new assurances from the Afghanistan government that were sufficient to insure no more transferred detainees would be tortured.

Throughout, the government has refused to say how many prisoners it has turned over, or whether it can account for all of them.