IRAQ: Eight Years of Abuses and Impunity

A leading human rights group released a report Monday documenting the proliferation of human rights abuses in Iraq since the United States' invasion in 2003.

Among the most egregious cases, the 102-page report by Human Rights Watch identifies women, journalists, detainees and marginalised groups, including internally displaced persons and religious minorities, as the most vulnerable populations in Iraq.

"Beyond the continuing violence and crimes associated with it, human rights abuses are commonplace," the report found. It said that in many instances the Iraqi government has failed to pursue "independent and impartial" investigations.

"At a Crossroads: Human Rights in Iraq Eight Years After the US-Led Invasion" is based on 178 interviews with individuals from a variety of stations in Iraqi society in seven cities across the country dating back to April 2010.

The Iraqi government is a party to a number of international treaties that clearly define the role of governments in preventing human rights abuses, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention against Torture. However, the report found that it has often failed to enact and enforce commensurate legal and penal codes.

A large portion of the HRW report focuses on the rights of women and girls. "The biggest victims in Iraq," says one female rights activist interviewed in Baghdad in 2010, "are young women." Before the 1991 Gulf War, the rights of women in Iraq were "relatively better protected than other countries in the region", thanks to a series of legal reforms promulgated by the Ba'ath Party, "specifically aimed at improving the status of women in both the public and private spheres", the report states.

But as Saddam Hussein began to embrace "Islamic and tribal traditions as a political tool to consolidate his waning power", the status of women's rights in Iraq witnessed a dramatic decline. This was only compounded by decades of war, international sanctions and occupation that negatively affected women and girls' rights disproportionally.

Forced marriages and prostitution and domestic and sexual abuse are frequent occurrences in Iraq, according to the report. In one case HRW investigated, a 14-year-old Baghdadi was kidnapped in 2010, drugged, taken to a residence that held other Arab and Kurdish girls and was forced to "sleep with one or two men daily" – a story familiar to many victims of forced prostitution in Iraq.

The report found that because "victims of sexual violence and trafficking have well-grounded fears of reprisals, social ostracism, rejection or physical violence from their families, and a lack of confidence that authorities have the will or capacity to provide the support or protection required," many cases go completely unnoticed by the Iraqi government. Even those cases that are referred to authorities are met with investigative reluctance.

Western and Iraqi governments' seemingly ambivalent response to the myriad human rights abuses include cases in which Iraqi journalists have been threatened or victims of illegal detention have been tortured. Several months of parliamentary gridlock in Iraq beginning in March 2010 caused pending human rights legislation to go unattended.

The HRW report also addresses the disproportionate number of religious minorities and other "marginalised communities" that have been forced from their homes and villages due to lack of security and religious extremism.

Millions of internally displaced Iraqis now face an increasingly precarious situation in what has become a full- fledged humanitarian crisis since the 2003 invasion. While security concerns have limited international humanitarian workers' access to Iraqi populations most in need, Iraq's government assistance to local NGOs, better suited to address the humanitarian issues, has been lacking. Several Washington-based advocacy groups, including Refugees International, have called on the United States to increase pressure on the Iraqi government to "meet its responsibilities to its own people".