TORONTO — Canada’s political parties averted a snap election Friday by reaching an agreement over how uncensored documents related to the treatment of Afghan detainees should be released to members of Parliament.

The documents are believed to allege Canadian government and military officials ignored evidence prisoners captured in Afghanistan by the Canadian military and handed over to the Afghan intelligence service in 2006 and 2007 were being tortured.

The government and opposition agreed Friday to establish a small, all-party committee sworn to secrecy to examine the disputed material.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson tabled the agreement-in-principle in the House of Commons.

“It’s an agreement that complies with Canadian law,” he said. “It does not compromise national security and it does not jeopardize the lives of the men and women who serve in uniform.”

The parties were forced to reach an agreement after Canada’s House of Commons Speaker last month ruled that the government breached Parliamentary privilege by refusing to release the uncensored documents to members of Parliament.

If the parties had failed to reach an agreement by today’s deadline, the House of Commons could then have voted on a motion to hold the Conservative government in contempt of Parliament, which could have triggered an election.

Opposition members voted in December to force the Conservative minority government to hand over the uncensored documents after Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government released only heavily censored documents.

The Conservative minority government has said releasing uncensored documents would be endanger national security.

The issue has been debated in Parliament since it was raised over a year ago by Richard Colvin, a senior Canadian diplomat and now an intelligence officer at the Canadian Embassy in Washington.

Colvin, who spent 18 months in Afghanistan as senior diplomat during 2006 and 2007, said Canadian officials knew detainees faced a high risk of torture for a year and a half but continued to order military police to hand over detainees to Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security.

Opposition members of Parliament have been concerned that the government is concealing its responsibility in the matter by not being fully compliant with its request to view uncensored documents.

Political party members said Friday that the all-party committee will decide which documents are relevant to the special committee’s work and a three-member panel of jurists will have the final say on what material can be made public.

Opium blight in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s opium yield is likely to drop by as much as 30 percent this year because blight is destroying fields full of poppies in the south — driving up prices amid a nationwide push to grow legal crops. Photo by The Associated Press file

AP