Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Foreign affairs censorship

To follow up on yesterday's post, I point to this Globe and Mail article which talks of a report from Foreign Affairs Canada about Afghanistan in 2006, in which sections touching on the human rights situation there have been blacked out.

The Foreign Affairs report, titled Afghanistan-2006; Good Governance, Democratic Development and Human Rights, was marked "CEO" for Canadian Eyes Only. It seems to remove any last vestige of doubt that the senior officials and ministers knew that torture and abuse were rife in Afghan jails.

The report leaves untouched many paragraphs such as those beginning "one positive development" or "there are some bright spots."

But heavy dark blocks obliterate sentences such as "the overall human rights situation in Afghanistan deteriorated in 2006."