House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken will rule this week on the historic confrontation between the opposition parties and the government over Prime Minister Stephen Harper's refusal to hand over secret information about potential detainee torture in Afghanistan, sources say.

Mr. Milliken's (Kingston and the Islands, Ont.) decision is centered on one of Parliament's most important principles—protection of the rights of MPs—but it is also central to the growing controversy over allegations that Afghan detainees were abused and tortured after Canadian troops transferred them to brutal members of Afghanistan's secret police.

The House Speaker has been asked to rule whether the government violated the privilege of MPs and held Parliament in contempt by refusing to table thousands of documents, in their uncensored form, that could divulge the extent of Canadian military and government knowledge of potential torture after prisoner transfers.

As MPs awaited his decision after final arguments in the Parliamentary legal battle, evidence began mounting at an inquiry into military police handling of detainees that the government was aware of more allegations of abuse than it had previously disclosed.

As well, a former Afghan interpreter who worked for Canadian troops in Afghanistan testified at the House of Commons special committee on Afghanistan that Brig.-Gen. Guy Laroche, a former commander of Canadian soldiers in Kandahar, knew prisoners would be tortured if they were handed over to the notorious secret police.

Ahmadshah Malgarai, an Afghan Canadian who worked as an interpreter for Canada's military, told the Commons Committee on Afghanistan on April 14 on Parliament Hill that Canadian soldiers deliberately transferred prisoners who were tortured. He said he discovered evidence that troops killed an innocent Afghan teen in 2007 and then tried to cover it up. The military said they will probe these 'grave accusations.'

At the Military Police Complaints Commission inquiry into possible torture, a Foreign Affairs Department monitor added eight more allegations of abuse when he testified about his first-hand experience in Kandahar three years ago.

Amnesty International lawyer Paul Champ told The Hill Times that the total number of prisoner abuse or torture allegations the government has known about since 2006 has now grown to 21—from evidence at the inquiry into Military Police actions and an earlier Federal Court case over detainees.

Evidence is also stacking up that the military police in Kandahar, who were responsible for transferring detainees captured and brought to the Canadian base by soldiers in the field, were kept in the dark about the fate of the detainees after the MPs handed them over to Afghan agents.

"Every single military police officer who has testified so far has indicated they did not see the (Canadian) detainee monitoring reporters," Mr. Champ told The Hill Times. "Why were those reports not passed on to the Military Police? The picture is emerging they were intentionally cut out of the loop."

Liberal MP Derek Lee (Scarborough-Rouge River, Ont.) launched the Commons legal attack against the government nearly two months ago, after Prime Minister Harper suspended Parliament for a month to delay the government's reaction to a Dec. 10 opposition motion ordering production of the uncensored documents. Most if not all of the documents have been tabled as evidence in a censored form at the Military Police Complaints Commission.

In one of the least-watched debates in recent Parliamentary history, likely ignored because of its long-winded and highly legalistic content, Mr. Lee and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson (Niagara Falls, Ont.) took turns swiping at each other over Mr. Lee's allegation a senior justice department lawyer had put Parliament in contempt by suggesting public servants could not avoid their government duties of secrecy while testifying at the Afghanistan committee.

Mr. Lee also took jabs at Mr. Nicholson for his assertion the government has a duty to protect the secret information on grounds of national security and other interests, and is actually doing so on behalf of one of the three component parts of Parliament—the Crown.

"While [Mr. Lee] may wish to invoke the idea of Parliamentary supremacy to support his point, it must be remembered that the Crown is as much a constituent part of Parliament as is the House of Commons and the Senate," Mr. Nicholson argued. "Those parts together can act to define the powers of each through statute, but the House alone cannot make law nor extend the scope of its privilege."

For his part, Mr. Lee rested his argument, among other things, on long-held constitutional convention and law saying the House of Commons has absolute authority to "send for person, papers and records" as it does its business, particularly when MPs believe their privileges and the right to conduct lawmaking and witness hearings have been violated.

"It is only among the uninformed and the negligently ignorant that the power to send for persons, papers and records would appear unclear," Mr. Lee told the Commons in his rebuttal to Mr. Nicholson. "Those powers and authorities are all part of Canada's Constitution. How desperately embarrassing it is that the attorney general of Canada could stand in this place and say these things."

The Hill Times