Tuesday, 14 Apr 2009
Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdistan region may have escaped the bloodshed that has blighted the rest of the country in recent years, but observers have warned of the desperate human rights situation.
Security forces that report directly to the region’s president and not the ministry are operating “beyond the rule of law” as detentions without trial and disappearances remain rife, a report out today claims.
Amnesty International, which conducted the report, said hundreds remain in long-term detention without trial, while electric shocks, beatings with wooden poles and beatings on the soles of the feet are routinely dished out as punishment for detainees.
“The Kurdistan region has been spared the bloodletting and violence that continues to wrack the rest of Iraq and the Kurdistan regional government has made some important human rights advances,” said Malcolm Smart, director of the human rights group’s Middle East and North Africa programme
“Yet real problems – arbitrary detention and torture, attacks on journalists and freedom of expression, and violence against women – remain, and urgently need to be addressed by the government.”
One case highlighted by the report is Walid Yunis Ahmad, a married father of three in his early 40s who worked at a radio and TV station linked to the Islamic Movement in Kurdistan. Originally detained in February 2000 by plain-clothed men believed to be from the Asayish security organisation, as of February this year he was still being held (reportedly in solitary confinement and in poor health) without charge or trial at the group’s headquarters in Erbil.
It took Mr Ahmad’s family three years to even discover that he was detained – after the Red Cross informed them of his detention, Amnesty International said.
Source: www.inthenews.co.uk, 14 Apr 2009