Canada has a new agreement with Afghan authorities over the treatment of prisoners handed to them. It is a very good agreement, equal to those obtained by the governments of Britain and the Netherlands in most ways, and superior in two significant ways -- a requirement that the Afghan governmentinvestigate allegations of abuse to international standards of justice and in consultation with the Canadian government and human-rights monitors, and an assurance that Canada or its representative may interview detainees in private. This latter clause especially comes perilously close to usurping Afghan sovereignty, illustrating the lengths to which that country's government was prepared to go to keep Canadian soldiers on the ground there. From a Canadian standpoint, then, it is satisfactory. All the safeguards required have been provided, and then some. The question now is whether the agreement is worth the paper it is written on.

To date, every promise made by Canada, and by Afghanistan, on the treatment of detainees has proven illusory. For a year, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor misled Parliament over the role of the Red Cross in monitoring detainees. Then assurances that representatives of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission were able to safeguard the human rights of the prisoners on Canada's behalf turned out to be untrue.

These were serious failures which have undermined public confidence in a critical mission. Afghan officials have been duplicitous, making extravagant claims of adherence to the Geneva Conventions and offering

covenants for detainees to be "treated humanely," and then engaging in all manner of abuse and torture in their medieval lockups. As an illustration of just how serious Afghan governments are about their undertakings to the international community, consider that Afghanistan ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture in 1985, when under communist rule, and remained a party to it even under the Taliban.

Human-rights reports have repeatedly cited abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan under the government of President Hamid Karzai. It is evidently too much to expect that a country which until 2001 was inured to barbarism would suddenly become the poster nation for universally protected rights standards, especially given that it is in the midst of a bloody civil war against a great evil. But every effort must still be brought to bear on the Karzai government to improve its record.

Canada cannot get into the business of warehousing suspected Taliban, and the prisoners should not be transported to this country. But there is more that Canadians can do beyond crossing their fingers that

Afghan officials will break with national tradition and uphold agreements that seek to end the practice of torture.

This country could, as Amnesty International has long argued, urge its partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to work with the Afghans to establish a detention facility, run by Afghans but under the tutelage of Western experts, as a model for the country's nascent justice and correctional system. The ultimate goal of the mission to Afghanistan was always meant to be nation-building. What better lesson for an emerging democracy than adherence to human-rights standards and the rule of law.