The interviews are harrowing. “It was the same routine, every day hanging me up and beating me. There are things they did to me there that I am too ashamed to talk about, but one thing I can tell you is that two times they made me sit on a bottle.” This is from interview number 106. The detainee who gave interview number 107 said: “They cuffed my hands behind my back and hanged my handcuffs from a hook on a chain from the ceiling. They didn’t really ask me questions, they just kept shouting [at me] to confess.”
In the depths of Iraqi detention centres, interviews were conducted with 235 detainees. Their testimony has been included in the report titled “Human Rights in the Administration of Justice in Iraq: legal conditions and procedural safeguards to prevent torture and ill-treatment” prepared by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UHCHR), issued on 3 August. The report covers the period 1 July 2019 to 30 April 2020.
“Torture is a reality in places of detention throughout Iraq,” it begins. This stark sentence opens the condemnation of the inhumane practices in the detention centres operated not only by the Ministries of Justice and the Interior, but also the Ministry of Defence, the Counterterrorism Service, the Baghdad Operations Command, the National Security Agency, the National Intelligence Service, and the Popular Mobilisation Forces. These are in addition to other places that the detainees do not know the location of.
The number of detainees is also unknown, as with the exception of the Ministry of Justice, which reported that there were 39,518 detainees in 2020, among them 2,115 women and 11,595 people sentenced to death, including 25 women; and 24,853 in facilities…