More than 900 people are facing immediate execution in Iraq, Amnesty International reports, and observers are worried that the ruling al-Da’wa party is using the death penalty to woo public support ahead of the 2010 elections.
Iraq, which executed 34 people in 2008, has killed 120 so far this year and has sentenced more than 1,000 people to death since capital punishment was reinstated in 2004. The country’s court system is still in shambles, however, and there are real concerns that many of the prisoners on death row were tortured into making false confessions and were convicted based on less-than-solid evidence.
More than 900 people have exhausted all of their appeals and could be executed anytime, Amnesty says. Among them are 17 women, including Samar Sa’ad ‘Abdullah, who says she was convicted of a crime committed by her fiance and alleged at her trial that she was beaten and electrocuted to force her to confess.
“In a country which already has one of the highest rates of execution in the world, the prospect that this statistic may rise significantly is disturbing indeed,” said Philip Luther, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.
Under Saddam Hussein, of course, there were countless executions (I’m not sure an accurate number exists), many of them conducted in public. On one day in 1999, Hussein’s government executed 100 people at Abu Ghraib.
It’s an ugly irony that with America’s nation-building in Iraq comes implicit support, through our leadership by example, for the rebuilding of an unjust death penalty.