Most of Iraq, Kurdistan Region’s prisons unfit for purpose: human rights group

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Most of Iraq and the Kurdistan Region’s prisons are unfit for purpose, a national human rights network said in its end-of-year report published this week.

Of the 30 prisons and reformatories the Justice Network for Prisoners (JNP) in Iraq visited between January 1 and December 25 of 2020, “ninety percent of the buildings are unfit to be prison institutions, either because of the old buildings and their infrastructure, or they are not designed for this purpose in the first place,” the JNP said.

Though detention facilities met some prisoner rights guidelines, including providing three meals a day, systemic registrations of the detainees and prisoners, and presenting clear rules and restrictions and providing medical teams and social workers, the network laid out 25 conditions that violated prisoner rights and needed reform.

All 30 of the facilities failed to provide adequately healthy meals, the JNP said. Four-fifths of prisons imposed “additional punishments” on prisoners, including solitary confinement, bans on visits, and reduced recreation time.

There was overcrowding at 73 percent of the sites visited – of particular danger as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

To limit the spread of the coronavirus at prisons, the Kurdistan Region’s judiciary approved the furlough of some 1,500 pre-trial detainees in April of this year - around a quarter of the Kurdistan Region's approximately 6,000 prison inmates. However, prison inmates told Rudaw English at the time that they still feared a rapid spread of the virus.

Managers of detention centers are also fearful of the effects of overcrowding on detainees.

”We are supposed to hold 70-80 detained convicts, but we have around 300 detained convicts and pre-trial detainees,” Teyb Abdulaziz, the head of the Women and Children’s Reformatory in Erbil told Rudaw English on Wednesday. “Our main problem is the lack of space."

Abdulaziz said that the facility is only supposed to host convicted detainees, and that overcrowding has gotten in the way of the provision of convict rehabilitation programs.

To reduce prison overcrowding, the JNP called on Iraq and the Kurdistan Region legislators to implement “alternative punishment”, and to reduce or review penal codes.