The Conservative government has decided to treat parts of ambassadors' reports about human rights in other countries as secret documents, something one critic calls "shocking."
University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran told CTV's Canada AM on Tuesday that if this stands, Canada will be the only major nation to do so.
"The Americans publish every single report of every country they study on a website every single year," he said.
"So do the British. And until now, Canada has been somewhere in the middle," Attaran said.
Government officials would prepare human rights reports, and citizens could request them by making access to information requests, he said.
"The Harper government has turned them into secrets, and started censoring bits of them, and now it seems they will disappear altogether," he said.
Attaran said he thinks the motive is to prevent embarrassment to its allies.
For example, a 2007 report on Afghanistan, leaked to the Globe and Mail, "said the Afghan government tortured. Well, that embarrassed the Harper government quite a bit," he said.
The government had released a version of the document that removed much of the most damaging information about Afghanistan.
Earlier this year, a leaked document said Israel and the United States tortured, he said.
"I think what is really going on is (Prime Minister Stephen) Harper does not want our allies to be shown up by our reporting of their problems," Attaran said.
But U.S., United Nations and British reports don't pull punches about human rights abuses, he said.
"Those are exactly the same sorts of things that the Harper government cut out about Afghanistan and now wants to do across the board."
Attaran is a frequent critic of the Harper government on issues like the torture of Afghan detainees.
He has launched a lawsuit against the federal government to get the full Afghan human rights report disclosed. He said he expects his case to be heard by a court this fall.
