Afghan detainee torture risk raised in 2005: diplomat
Posted in Uncategorized on 03/10/2010 09:55 am by admin 
Afghan police guard a prison in Kabul in 2004. Canadian diplomat Eillen Olexiuk says she raised the possibility that detainees transfered from Canadian to Afghan custody were at risk of torture in 2005. (Musadeq Sadeq/Associated Press)
A Canadian diplomat with extensive continued in Afghanistan says she raised the possibility that detainees transferred from Canadian to Afghan safe-keeping were at venture of torture in a backward direction. \ in 2005, but her concerns were ignored.
In one excluding interview with CBC News, Eillen Olexiuk, who arrived in Afghanistan in 2002 and was second in overlook at the Canadian Embassy in Kabul, said she told the Liberal rule in power at the hour of travail that the transfer agreement didn’t do sufficiency to protect detainees.
Canadian officials at the time weren’face to face monitoring detainees after the transfer, and that left detainees vulnerable to torture once they were in Afghan hands, reported Olexiuk, who met by torment victims during her three years in Afghanistan.
She reported she documented her concerns in human rights reports prepared for the Department of Foreign Affairs, stressing that Canadians should have been visiting the detainees regularly after transfers and making records of detainees who were still core held and those who had been released.
But Olexiuk said her advice was ignored by Paul Martin’sitting government.
“I don’t take it anybody actually cared, quite frankly,” she said.
It was only in 2007 that allegations of extreme pain arose in the media, with reports of transferred detainees being baffled dispirited, whipped, starved, frozen, choked and shocked.
After the allegations arose, Stephen Harper’sitting newly elected Conservative government signed a make over agreement through Afghanistan in May 2007, allowing Canadian officials to visit prisons and track detainees who had been transferred in that place.
Allegations of torture have continued, despite that agreement.
Richard Colvin, a higher diplomat with Canada’s Afghan mission, testified before a House of Commons committee in November 2009 that detainees go on to subsist tortured. His testimony renewed debate in Ottawa over the fate of detainees.
With files from James Cudmore
