MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : NO HUMAN RIGHTS IN IRAQI KURDISTAN – Human rights situation in Iraqi Kurdistan is ‘getting worse’: official – Diya Butros, President of Iraqi Kurdistan Region’s Independent Human Rights Commission

SOUTH KURDISTAN (IRAQ) – 12 Dec 2018

SULAIMANI, Iraq’s Kurdistan region,— The security situation is progressively getting worse in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region amid an increase in homicides, a Kurdish official has said.“Whenever crime increases in any country, it means that country’s security forces have no ability to protect people’s lives,” head of the Independent Human Rights Commission Diya Butros said in a press conference on Sunday (December 9).

“The human rights situation in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq is getting worse day by day.”

He added that the increase in the number of murders was due to the rising availability of guns.Activist Farman Rashad told NRT TV that an independent judiciary was necessary for the situation to improve.In the current environment, many suspects are protected by powerful interests who use the courts to deny justice to victims.“[The police] haven’t arrested people who carry out crimes. As we have seen, police in Erbil and Sulaimani accuse each other of sheltering perpetrators,” Rashid said.

On December 5, a member of the Emergency Department of the Sulaimani Police Directorate was shot and killed on his way home.Two days earlier, a surgeon was shot and wounded inside his clinic in Sulaimani city. Dozens of homicides and suicides have occurred in Iraqi Kurdistan Region in 2018.As many as 37 women have been killed in the Kurdish region in the first ten months of 2018, according to statistics, but few men face punishment for those murders.Read more about Freedom of Expression and Journalism in Iraqi Kurdistan – www.mesop.de