Public interest goes private – How can the Military Police Complaints Commission be trusted to get to the bottom of torture allegations if it arbitrarily waives its committment to openness?
Canadian troops detain an Afghan man during Operation Medusa in the Panjwaii district of Kandahar province on Sept. 5, 2006.
The Globe And Mail Newspaper Editorial
Barring the doors of a hearing on whether Canada violated international laws related to torture goes against this country’s history and basic democratic norms. There is a presumption of openness in public hearings – in court, in Parliament, in quasi-judicial bodies. Yet it was overcome yesterday at the Military Police Complaints Commission in Ottawa without the media being given a warning, or a chance to argue for openness, or to find out a concrete justification for the closed hearing.
There is an overwhelming public interest in the possible Canadian involvement, even indirectly, in torture abroad. That is why the MPCC called this inquiry the Afghanistan Public Interest Hearings. Public interest hearings held in private are at risk of absurdity.
Was the closing of the hearing justified? It is impossible to know. All that is known is the justice department’s nebulous, stated reason – national security. The MPCC did not bother to offer any reason at all; it merely advised that the hearings were going in-camera.
“National security” is not some magical incantation that causes the Constitution to be punted out the window. It needs to be explained, and weighed against the principle of openness. How would a hearing on the alleged torture of detainees turned over to Afghan authorities by Canadian military police in 2007 affect national security today? No one has even attempted an answer. The government is creating more suspicion and distrust, unnecessarily, if its reasons for requesting a closed hearing are sound.
Openness is not a principle that can be waived by the parties to a hearing. Constitutionally, it belongs to the public and the media. Yet Glenn Stannard, a former Windsor, Ont., police chief who is the MPCC’s interim chairman, appears (insofar as one can perceive matters through a closed door) not to have defended the principle adequately. When the government asked, at an in-camera hearing yesterday, for two days of closed hearings, only Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, which brought the complaint about alleged torture, were there to debate it.
. . . Click Here to read the complete Editorial .
Tags: Afghan Detainees
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