BARCELONA, Spain – Iraqi authorities are detaining thousands of Iraqi women illegally and subjecting many to torture and ill-treatment, including sexual abuse, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report Thursday.
The report documents abuses of women in detention, based on interviews with women and girls in prison, as well as their families, lawyers and prison medical service providers.
The report comes at a time of escalating sectarian violence in Iraq, involving security forces and armed groups.
“The vast majority of the more than 4,200 women detained in interior- and defense ministry facilities are Sunni, but the abuses HRW documents affect women of all sects and classes throughout Iraqi society.
Iraq’s large Sunni minority complains of large-scale discrimination by the Shiite led government in Baghdad.
The105 page report, titled “No one is safe: Abuses of women in Iraq’s criminal justice system,” says Iraq’s weak judiciary, plagued by corruption, frequently bases convictions on coerced confessions. It says that trial proceedings fall far short of international standards.
“Many women were detained for months or even years without charge before seeing a judge,” said the report.
“Iraqi security forces and officials act as if brutally abusing women will make the country safer,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at HRW.
“In fact, these women and their relatives have told us that as long as security forces abuse people with impunity, we can only expect security conditions to worsen,” he pointed out.
HRW also reviewed court documents and extensive information received in meetings with Iraqi authorities including Justice, Interior, Defense, and Human Rights ministry officials, and two deputy prime ministers.
In January 2013, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki promised to reform the criminal justice system, beginning with releasing detained women who had judicial orders of release.
A year later, the brutal tactics of security forces remain essentially the same and hundreds of women remain in detention illegally, the New York-based watchdog said.
Many of the 27 women who spoke with HRW described being beaten, kicked, slapped, hung upside-down and beaten on their feet (falaqa), given electric shocks, and raped or threatened with sexual assault by security forces during their interrogation.
One woman arrived at the meeting with HRW representatives, inside Iraq’s death row facility in Baghdad’s Kadhimiyya neighborhood, on crutches. She said nine days of beatings, electric shocks, and falaqa in March 2012 had left her permanently disabled.
The report said the split nose, back scars, and burns on her breast that HRW observed were consistent with the abuse she alleged. She was executed in September 2013, seven months after HRW interviewed her, despite lower court rulings that dismissed charges against her following a medical report that supported her alleged torture.
HRW found that Iraqi security forces regularly arrest women illegally and commit other due process violations against women at every stage of the justice system. Women are subjected to threats of, or actual, sexual assault, sometimes in front of husbands, brothers, and children.
Failure by the courts to investigate allegations of abuse and hold the abusers responsible encourages the police to falsify confessions and use torture, HRW said.
Iraq’s broken criminal justice system fails to achieve justice for victims either of security force abuses or of criminal attacks by armed groups, the watchdog said. Arrests and convictions documented by HRW appeared often to have been predicated on information provided by secret informants and confessions coerced under torture.
“We don’t know who we fear more, al-Qaeda or SWAT,” said one Fallujah resident, referring to the special forces unit that carries out counterterrorism operations. “Why would we help them fight al-Qaeda when they’ll just come for us as soon as they’re done with them?”
“The abuses of women we documented are in many ways at the heart of the current crisis in Iraq,” Stork said. “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.”
Violence in Iraq is some of its highest levels, with more than 1,000 people killed last month in the country.
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