Legal Commentary

Report: Iraq Criminal Justice System Failures

By Jeralyn

Human Rights Watch released a report Sunday on the quality of criminal justice in Iraq.

This 42-page report documents how thousands of defendants in Iraq wait months or even years before facing a judge and hearing charges against them in the Central Criminal Court (CCCI), and cannot pursue a meaningful defense or challenge evidence against them. A US-Iraq security agreement that takes effect at year's end will transfer detainees held by the US-led Multinational Force to Iraqi jurisdiction, adding to the court's cases.

The 42 page report is available here (pdf).

Among the findings: [More...]

The Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI) is the country's flagship criminal justice institution. Yet it is an institution that is seriously failing to meet international standards of due process and fair trials. Defendants often endure long periods of pretrial detention without judicial review, and are not able to pursue a meaningful defense or challenge evidence against them. Abuse in detention, typically with the aim of extracting confessions, appears common, thus tainting court proceedings in those cases.

....Human Rights Watch monitored court proceedings and met with judges, defense attorneys, defendants, and others. We found that the majority of defendants endured lengthy pretrial detention without judicial review, that they had ineffectual legal counsel, and the court frequently relied on the testimony of secret informants and confessions likely to have been extracted under duress. Judges in many instances acknowledged these failings and dismissed some cases accordingly, particularly those involving alleged torture, but the numbers of cases where such allegations arise suggest that serious miscarriages of justice are frequent. Human Rights Watch also monitored a limited number of cases involving children, and found that the authorities failed to hold them separately from adult detainees, and that their access to counsel and prompt legal hearings was no better than that of adults.

There are also problems related to torture. The report makes several recommendations.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on December 15, 2008 (boomark / email).