Iraqi authorities are detaining thousands of women illegally and subjecting many to torture and ill-treatment, including the threat of sexual abuse, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report published yesterday.
Many women were detained for months or even years without charge before seeing a judge, HRW said, and security forces often questioned them about their male relatives’ activities rather than crimes in which they themselves were implicated.
In custody, women described being kicked, slapped, hung upside-down and beaten on the soles of their feet, given electric shocks, threatened with sexual assault by security forces during interrogation and even raped in front of their relatives and children.
“The abuses of women we documented are in many ways at the heart of the current crisis in Iraq,” HRW deputy Middle East and North Africa director Joe Stork said in a statement accompanying the report, titled: No One Is Safe: Abuses of Women in Iraq’s Criminal Justice System.
“These abuses have caused a deep-seated anger and lack of trust between Iraq’s diverse communities and security forces, and all Iraqis are paying the price,” he said.
A spokesman for Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry said the testimonies in the report were “overexaggerated,” but acknowledged that “we have some limited illegal behaviors which were practiced by security forces against women prisoners,” which it said had been identified by the ministry’s own teams.
These teams had referred their reports to the relevant authorities, “asking them to bring those who are responsible for mistreating female detainees to justice,” the spokesman said.
“Iraq is still working to put an end to prison abuse and, with more time, understanding of law and patience, such illegal practices will become a history,” he said.
The 105-page report is based on interviews with imprisoned Sunni and Shiite women and girls, although Sunnis make up the vast majority of the more than 4,200 women detained in interior and defense ministry facilities, HRW said.
The release of women detainees was a main demand of Sunnis who began demonstrating late in 2012 against the Shiite-led government, which they accuse of marginalizing their community.
Security forces cleared one of two Sunni protest camps in Anbar Province in December last year. In the ensuing backlash, militants seized the city of Falluja and parts of Ramadi.
Since then, more than 1,000 people have been killed across Iraq, according to Iraq Body Count, and the army is preparing for a possible ground assault to retake Falluja.
One woman who entered her meeting with HRW at a death row facility in Baghdad on crutches said she had been permanently disabled by abuse, displaying injuries consistent with the mistreatment she alleged.
Seven months later, she was executed despite lower court rulings that dismissed charges against her following a medical report that supported her accusations of torture.
HRW described Iraq’s judiciary as weak and plagued by corruption, with convictions frequently based on coerced confessions, and trial proceedings that fall far short of international standards.
If women are released unharmed, they are frequently stigmatized by their family or community, who perceive them to have been dishonored, HRW said.
“Both men and women suffer from the severe flaws of the criminal justice system. But women suffer a double burden due to their second-class status in Iraqi society,” HRW said.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
RSS