Iraq should also grant immediate access to U.N. human rights monitors and international non-governmental organizations that could assist in clarifying the fate of the detainees.
Human Rights Watch called on the government of Iraq to make public the names and places of detention of those benefiting from the amnesty as well as those still incarcerated. Iraq should also keep a publicly accessible register of all persons who surrender to the authorities under the terms of the amnesty so their fate can be monitored.
“If the general amnesty is in good faith, the government must also account for all those who did not emerge into the daylight this week,” said Hanny Megally, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa Division at Human Rights Watch.
Human Rights Watch urged the Iraqi authorities to provide guarantees that those released will not be summarily rearrested. According to information gathered by Human Rights Watch after previous amnesties in Iraq, some of those released were re-arrested within days or weeks, while others who emerged from hiding or who returned from abroad ‘disappeared’ after surrendering to the authorities. In other instances, convicted criminal offenders were released in lieu of political detainees.
Most of those released in this amnesty appear to have been inmates of official prisons, such as Abu Ghraib and the central prisons in major cities. “We are particularly concerned about the fate of political detainees held in secret or unacknowledged places of detention, in military garrisons, and in the headquarters of Iraq’s security and intelligence apparatuses,” Megally said.
Such places include the notorious al-Radhwaniyya garrison, located northwest of Baghdad, where thousands of Shi’a Muslims and others suspected of having taken part in the March 1991 uprising have been imprisoned. Hundreds are believed to have been executed there without trial and buried in mass graves nearby. Suspects have also been held in unacknowledged places of detention, including the headquarters of the National Olympic Committee in Baghdad, headed by ‘Uday Saddam Hussain, the Iraqi president’s eldest son.
Human Rights Watch called on the Iraqi government to back up its amnesty initiative by issuing an urgent invitation to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Iraq, as well as the U.N. Commission on Human Rights’s special investigative experts on torture, arbitrary detention and “disappearances.” The Iraqi government should cooperate with these international human rights monitors to clarify the fate of the several hundred thousand Iraqis who ‘disappeared’ during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as that of hundreds of Kuwaitis and other nationals who remain unaccounted for since 1991.
They should also be permitted to investigate allegations of a “prison cleansing” campaign launched by the government in 1998 and supervised by Saddam Hussain’s younger son, Qusay. According to the testimonies of former intelligence personnel and other state employees, several thousand inmates have been summarily executed within prison walls and then buried in unmarked graves over the past several years.
The general amnesty issued by Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council (Decree 225 of 20 October 2002) appears to be the most comprehensive issued to date. Those who stand to benefit from its terms include both civilians and military personnel who were either detained or at large within Iraq and abroad. Also potential beneficiaries are detainees, such as those under sentence of death and those convicted for ‘moral crimes’ who, as a rule, have been excluded in earlier amnesties.
Two categories of detainees, according to the text of this amnesty, were excluded: those charged with or convicted for murder and where “no reconciliation has been reached with the families of the murdered,” and those detained in connection with debts owed to individuals or to the state, who remain held until the debts are honored. The imprisonment of persons solely for contractual obligations violates Article 11 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Iraq is a state party. Shortly after the announcement of the amnesty on Sunday, Iraq’s justice minister Mundhir al-Shawi announced on television that those held in connection with espionage for the United States and the “Zionist entity” would also be excluded. Numerous detainees have in the past been held on espionage charges based on spurious evidence, often consisting of ‘confessions’ extracted under torture.
