Human Rights Watch accuses Iraq of increasing ‘unlawful executions’

BAGHDAD – Human Rights Watch accused Iraq Tuesday of widening the “scale and pace of unlawful executions in 2024”, calling on authorities to “urgently halt all pending executions and declare a moratorium”.

In recent years Iraqi courts have ordered hundreds of executions in “terror” cases, proceedings that rights groups say often lack due process or in which confessions suspected to have been extracted through torture are admissible.

“The  Iraqi government dramatically increased the scale and pace of unlawful executions in 2024,” HRW said.

The New York-based watchdog pointed to “credible allegations of torture and violations of the right to a fair trial”.

It said it had reviewed pictures of three executed men whose bodies bore “visible signs of mistreatment or torture, including heavy bruising, broken bones, wounds, and emaciation”.

HRW added that documented cases showed that “Iraqi authorities have increasingly threatened death row inmates and nongovernmental groups for speaking out about conditions in the Nasiriyah Central Prison” in southern Iraq.

Several rights groups have condemned extreme conditions in the facility, which is also known as Al-Hut Prison.

“Iraqi authorities are carrying out state-sanctioned murder on a disturbing scale,” said Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East and North Africa director.

“Signing off on these unlawful executions will leave President Abdul Latif Rashid’s legacy stained with blood,” she added.

“Iraq should urgently halt all pending executions and declare a moratorium with a view to abolishing the death penalty,” the group said.

It added that none of the families or lawyers of the executed men interviewed by HRW said they had received prior notice of the executions.

Some 50 people were executed in September on various charges including “terrorism”, according to AFAD, an independent group monitoring rights violations in Iraq.

In June, AFAD condemned what it described as a surge in “secret executions”, pointing to 63 such cases that were not publicly announced in previous weeks.

In July, Iraq hanged 10 “terror” convicts, officials said, in the fourth group execution in three months.

UN experts said in June they were “alarmed by the high number of executions publicly reported since 2016, nearly 400, including 30 this year”.

“When arbitrary executions are on a widespread and systematic basis, they may amount to crimes against humanity,” said the special rapporteurs including the expert on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary execution.

At the end of July, Iraq’s Justice Minister Khaled Shuani dismissed the UN experts’ analysis as “not based on documented evidence”, the official Iraqi News Agency reported.

AFP