Iraq's criminal court 'failing to provide justice'

IRAQ’S CENTRAL criminal court is failing to meet accepted standards of due process or to conduct fair trials.

This is the assessment of Human Rights Watch in a report, The Quality of Justice, issued this week on the country’s flagship judicial institution.

“Defendants often endure long periods of pre-trial 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.”

Judges in some cases acknowledge these problems and have dismissed indictments, particularly those involving torture, but “the numbers of cases where such allegations arise suggest that serious miscarriages of justice are frequent.”

Children are held with adults in spite of an Iraqi law specifying that they should be held separately.

The central criminal court of Iraq (CCCI), which “commands greater resources and broader authority than any other Iraqi criminal justice institution”, was established in 2003 by the Coalition Provisional Authority and was empowered to deal with security-related offences.

According to the decree creating the court, its main task is to develop “a judicial system in Iraq that warrants the trust, confidence and respect of the Iraqi people”.

Instead, Human Rights Watch says that “the court has failed to provide basic assurances of fairness, undermining the concept of a national justice system serving the rule of law”.

Political partisanship and bureaucratic inefficiency contribute to the failure of the court while the large number of detainees “has put a serious strain on the CCCI, where dozens of judges hear thousands of cases a month”. Strain has exacerbated delays of detention reviews.

Lawyers are often called to represent clients without preparation and court appointed counsel do not appear.

The Iraqi justice system does not have the authority to prosecute torturers and abusers or jurisdiction over Iraqis held by US and other foreign forces.

The report is timely because on January 1st, the US military is due to begin releasing the 16,000 prisoners it holds to the Iraqi authorities.

Most prisoners are Sunnis, analysts say, and have been detained without cause and should be freed. By turning them over to the Iraqi prison service and judiciary, the US risks subjecting them to torture and abuse and unfair trials.

Furthermore, conditions in Iraqi-run prisons are worse than those at US-operated facilities.

Yesterday Muntazir Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at US president George Bush during a Baghdad press conference on Sunday, was handed over to the Iraqi judiciary for prosecution. Mr Zaidi, who his brother said has a broken arm and cracked ribs, could face a sentence of two years in prison for insulting a visiting foreign leader.