Nato countries risk turning a blind eye to torture by continuing to transfer detainees to Afghan prisons, according to a report from Amnesty International.
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International law prohibits the transfer of prisoners if there is reason to suspect abuse or torture.
Amnesty wants transfers to cease until proper safeguards are put in place.
Some members of the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) - including the UK, the Netherlands and Canada - have "memorandums of understanding" with the Afghan authorities, which are supposed to ensure that transferred detainees are treated according to international standards.
But Amnesty says that proper monitoring of the agreements is impossible, partly because much of the country is inaccessible.
Food deprivation
The report says that prisoners have been whipped, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of food.
And it concludes that all prisoner transfers should be suspended while efforts are made to improve Afghanistan's prisons and training is given to Afghan prison staff.
Only when the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan meets international standards should prisoner transfers resume, the report urges.
But Isaf is unwilling to change the current arrangement.
"Afghanistan is a sovereign country... which has the legal responsibility for detention of Afghans," said Isaf spokesman James Appathurai.
"It is not for Nato to create a parallel detention structure outside the law of the land", he added.
Amnesty said British authorities had confirmed that they were looking into the alleged torture of a transferred prisoner in September, and that Belgian officials had admitted losing track of a suspected suicide bomber after he had been transferred to the NDS.
The report specifically did not examine US troops' detention system in Afghanistan.
(BBC)
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