Over 440 death row inmates in Kurdistan Region: Official

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - There are more than five thousand inmates inside the Kurdistan Region’s correctional facilities, over 440 of which have been handed the death sentence, a social affairs official told Rudaw on Thursday.

There are six correctional facilities across the Kurdistan Region, consisting of three for male prisoners and three for women and juvenile pretrial detainees and prisoners.

“According to the latest data, across all six correctional centers, there are 5,091 prisoners, 446 of which have been sentenced to death,” Ihsan Abdulrahman, head of the Kurdistan Region’s general corrections directorate told Rudaw’s Nazanin Goran, adding that 1,038 of the inmates were held on drug-related charges.

More than two thousand prisoners are held in Erbil’s correctional facilities, the most out of the Region’s provinces.

The directorate is set to open up a new correctional center in Garmiyan administration’s Kifri district later this month due to the overcrowding of the facilities, according to Abdulrahman, who also revealed that they were working on establishing a new center in Erbil’s Soran administration.

Kurdistan Region courts issue death sentences but the government has a de facto moratorium on carrying out executions. Those sentenced to death are neither executed nor given a new sentence leaving their fate unclear. Legal experts have criticized this method saying it creates a legal gap.

In its 2022 report on human rights practices in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, the US State Department criticized the overcrowding in the Region’s detention centers, saying the number of detainees had exceeded the facilities’ designed capacity by 157 percent during that year.

The report also criticized the centers’, sanitation, hygiene, lack of adequate water, lack of adequate medical services, outdated infrastructure, and violence used during preliminary detention.

The United Nations’ Committee against Torture in a May 2022 report expressed concern over “continued reports of torture or ill-treatment in detention facilities” in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, calling on the authorities to ensure accountability.

Amnesty International in its annual report on the death sentence confirmed 11 executions in Iraq during 2022, down from 17 in the previous year. The number of death sentences issued in the country also dropped significantly, going from 91 in 2021 to 41 in 2022.