Corruption and human rights abuse in Iraq

 Rights report criticises Iraq government

Al Jazeera reports (January 22^nd): A new report from Human Rights Watch accuses Iraq's government of abusing protesters and harassing journalists.

The report says torture continued even as the US military handed detainees over to Iraq before leaving the country last year.

http://www.aljazeera.com/video/middleeast/2012/01/201212210501321441.html

Human Rights Watch: Iraq getting worse

CNN reports (January 22^nd): The human rights situation in Iraq is worse now than it was a year ago, the campaign group Human Rights Watch argues in a new report, warning that people are being tortured with impunity in secret prisons.

The group says it uncovered a secret prison where detainees were beaten, hung upside down and given electric shocks to sensitive parts of their bodies. Human Rights Watch based its claims on the testimony of detainees themselves.

 http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/22/world/meast/iraq-human-rights/index.html

Iraq's Maliki accused of detaining hundreds of political opponents

McClatchy reports (January 19th): Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's security services have locked up more than 1,000 members of other political parties over the past several months, detaining many of them in secret locations with no access to legal counsel and using "brutal torture" to extract confessions, his chief political rival has charged.

Ayad Allawi, the secular Shiite Muslim leader of the mainly Sunni Muslim Iraqiya bloc in parliament, who served as prime minister of the first Iraqi government after the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein, has laid out his allegations in written submissions to Iraq's supreme judicial council.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/19/136386/iraqs-maliki-accused-of-detaining.html

 Corruption in Iraq

The Guardian reports (January 16^th): Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years his mother heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison.

"We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else. I cried: 'Your mother dies for you, my dear son.' I picked dirt from the floor and smacked it on my head. They dragged me out and wouldn't let me see him again.

Afterwards, the officers called from prison demanding hefty bribes to let him go while telling the family he was being tortured. Um Hussein told the officers she would pay, but they kept asking for more.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/16/corruption-iraq-son-tortured-pay