BAGHDAD -- Iraq has executed nearly 100 people so far this year, a big increase over previous years that has intensified concern about whether defendants are receiving fair trials in a country where the United States has spent billions of dollars trying to reform the judicial system after decades of dictatorship.
The government says most of the executed had been convicted of terrorism as bombings and shootings persist in Iraq, albeit not at the levels at the height of its conflict years ago. However, international observers worry that the legal process is faulty and that some trials are politically motivated – including this month's death sentence against Iraq's fugitive Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, a longtime foe of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who was convicted in absentia of running death squads.
The executions in 2012 of at least 96 people, all by hanging, amount to more than a quarter of all convicts who have been put to death in the last eight tumultuous years under leaders who struggled to stabilize a country at war after dictator Saddam Hussein was ousted in the U.S.-led war.
Christof Heyns, the U.N. investigator on arbitrary executions, described the government-sanctioned executions as "arbitrary killing" that is "committed behind a smokescreen of flawed legal processes." He warned that the " continued lack of transparency about the implementation of the death penalty in Iraq, and the country's recent record, raise serious concerns about the question of what to expect in the future."
In the last month alone, the government executed 26 people, including a
Saudi, a Syrian and three Iraqi women. The executions were announced
with no details about the names or trials of those who were killed,
drawing widespread international denunciation.
Source: Huffington Post, September 23, 2012
