Ottawa

‘You have your law, we have ours’

The government has tabled another 6,200 pages of detainee documents today. As with last week’s documents, these were not reviewed by Justice Frank Iacobucci, the respected jurist theoretically hired to do just that and cited yesterday by the Justice Minister as the solution to the government’s current standoff with Parliament.

Meanwhile, CBC gets hold of an uncensored report about Afghan attempts to block detainee inspections.

The Afghan human rights agency was appointed by Canada to be its eyes and ears in Afghan prisons at the time. The rights group was supposed to help ensure the safety of detainees who had been transferred from Canadian troops to the Afghans. The Afghan security service, the NDS, took those detainees from the Canadians. The uncensored version of the document states there were “… five failed attempts to access Kandahar NDS facilities in 2007.”

The document says the NDS response on detainee access was often, “You have your law, we have ours.” It says Afghan human rights experts “discussed the access problem with [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai … however, this did not help.”

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