ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—The number of inmates under death sentence in the Kurdistan region has grown to a record high as authorities continue to maintain a de facto moratorium on death penalty.
In the region’s three provinces, there are now 205 prisoners who have been sentenced to death. The number is higher than in any year since the 1990s when the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) established its autonomous courts, virtually independent of Iraq’s judiciary.
Apart from terrorism-related cases, no other death sentence has been carried out since 2008 because KRG President Masoud Barzani has refrained from ordering the executions to be carried out.
Kurdistan Parliament passed a terrorism bill on April 4, 2006, that instructs the death penalty for acts of terrorism or affiliation with a terrorist organization.
“These inmates are in terrible mental condition since they have no idea whether they will be executed or not,” said KRG Minister of Social Affairs Muhammad Hawdiani.
Hawdiani said he supports abolishing the death penalty and has recommended the sentences for these inmates be commuted to life in prison.
The Human Rights Committee in the Kurdistan Parliament, in coordination with the Directorate of Human Rights Affairs, prepared a bill in 2011 to abolish the death penalty in the region. The bill has passed to parliament for discussion, but no date has so far been set to vote on it.
The number of prisoners on death row rose from 135 in 2011 to 205 in 2015, partly due to changing attitudes toward the judiciary in terms of families of victims reaching settlements outside the court system.
In capital punishment cases, if the perpetrator and the victim's family resolve through the traditional settlement "sulh," the death sentence is altered to life incarceration.
Bestun Fayeq, a lawmaker who works with human rights in the Kurdish parliament, said the Kurdistan region should push Iraq to abolish death sentences all together.
“It would solve the problem fundamentally because the death penalty is still very much implemented in rest of Iraq,” Fayeq said.
Over 1,700 people were on death row in Iraq towards the end of 2014 despite widespread use of death penalty in the country. According to a recent United Nations report 177 people were executed in 2013.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein and UN Special Representative for Iraq Nickolay Mladenov have urged Iraq to impose a moratorium on the death penalty and has called on the Kurdistan region to abolish it permanently.
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