The United Nations called on Iraq on Friday to halt all executions after 42 people were hanged this week in what it said were most probably illegal mass executions ordered by Baghdad’s “seriously flawed” justice system.
They were executed on Wednesday and yesterday – which was World Day against the Death Penalty.
The world body called on Iraq to stop the executions and commute the sentences of the hundreds of other people believed to be on death row.
“Large-scale executions of the sort that have been carried out on a number of occasions over the past two years in Iraq are not only obscene and inhuman, they are most probably in contravention of international law,” UN human rights spokesman Rupert Colville told a news briefing.
International human rights law requires that defendants be given fair trials and that confessions are not obtained under torture, he said. The death penalty should only be handed down for the most serious crimes such as murder.
“UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has repeatedly stressed after earlier mass executions in 2012 and 2013 that the justice system in Iraq is too seriously flawed to warrant even a limited application of the death penalty, let alone dozens of executions at a time,” Colville said.
Source: Reuters