With the recent public acknowledgment by the Canadian government that thousands of children died in church-run "Indian residential schools" across Canada, that country faces a historic test: will it hold itself and its churches accountable for the crimes against humanity inflicted by them on aboriginal people?

So far, the answer appears to be No.

Ever since the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail reported that half of the children in residential schools died there (April 24, 2007), the government has moved quickly to absolve the Catholic, Anglican and United Churches from any liability for these deaths and block any criminal investigation into residential school crimes.

Despite an official and guarded "apology" issued by Prime Minister Harper to residential school survivors on June 11 2008, little is being done on the ground for these more than 100 000 survivors, over half of whom have been disqualified by the Harper government from receiving any form of compensation for their suffering.

Even worse, by stating last February that no criminal investigation will be conducted into the residential schools, and that survivors would not even be allowed to name their abusers or mention wrongdoing in these "schools", the Canadian government appears to be tacitly condoning that wrongdoing and shielding the churches from any prosecution or accountability for their criminal acts.

Meanwhile, the evidence of those crimes continues to grow across Canada, as more survivors are stepping forward to describe enduring involuntary sterilizations, slave labor, gang rape, torture and medical experimentation at the residential schools and adjoining "Indian hospitals". Every act defined as genocide in the United Nations Convention occurred in Canadian residential schools, whose dead may number as many as 50 000 children over a century.

These are hardly new revelations. In 1907, a government medical inspector named Dr. Peter Bryce discovered that residential school staff and clergy were routinely exposing healthy children to those dying of tuberculosis, and then not treating them: a regular practice that spanned decades, and which accounted for the enormous mortality rate. Eyewitnesses like Delmar Johnny, Rick Lavallee, William Combes and Willie Sport have confirmed this murderous practice in their sworn testimonies. Each of them describes being forced to sleep or play with fellow residential school students who were dying of tuberculosis. The same witnesses, and many more, report burying other children who died of the disease or from other causes, like beatings and electric shocks given to them by school staff members.

What is so alarming about this Canadian genocide is how pervasive the evidence of it is, and yet how little has been done to acknowledge or rectify it, since the same institutions that are responsible for these crimes are the parties "investigating" them and offering "healing and reconciliation" to their victims.

The hard truth is that the main actors of this apparent genocide - the Catholic, Anglican and United churches of Canada - have been effectively absolved from any prosecution for a regime that can and should be described as the worst crime in Canadian history. These churches are not even required to identify the location of the mass burial sites where many of these children are interred. And to date, not a single person in Canada has been arrested or tried for the death of a child in an Indian residential school.

While international law and the evidence itself stands on the side of the survivors, the latter are dying off daily from the effects of starvation, torture and ruination at the schools, in what Squamish hereditary chief Kiapilano has described as "the ongoing slaughter of our people".

In his issuing of an eviction notice to the Catholic, Anglican and United churches on his traditional territory, which takes in all of the city of Vancouver, Chief Kiapilano told reporters last April 10,

"You're ten times more likely to die in Canada if you're an Indian. You're fifty times more likely to go to jail if you have my skin color. And that's mostly because of the residential school and the way it destroyed our lives. It's time the churches that caused this leave our land, because they're never going to be held accountable for what they did. So we call on the world to witness to what we are doing, and help us win our land and our lives back."

Humanists need to ask how and why modern churches can evade responsibility for criminal acts, and demand that governments stop aiding that evasion. Canada is demonstrating that even democracies can allow genocide to go unrevealed and unpunished. It is up to all people of conscience to challenge such wrongdoing by standing by the Nuremberg Principle, that institutions and heads of state be held as accountable as individuals for crimes against humanity.

I hope that all Humanists will pressure their own governments to support a call at the United Nations for a full investigation into the churches and government of Canada for their complicity in genocide.

Kevin D. Annett is Secretary, The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada and Member, Humanist Association of Canada