Legal Village

'Amnesty' in Iraq

Posted 14/04/2008 by Ben Hallman

It was a two car-bomb morning. The first, around 7.30 am, shook the press centre. We’re close to the Red Zone (in fact, some call this area the Orange Zone) and the explosion sounded like it was just outside the walls. I heard the second explosion while conducting an interview at the Rusafa prison and court complex in central Baghdad. According to an early news report, the bomb was placed under a parked car near downtown and killed four people.

James Geoghegan, the public affairs officer at the complex, told me how to distinguish a car-bomb from a mortar. A mortar, he says, sounds like a crash, like someone dropped a trailer from the sky. A car bomb explosion has a deeper timbre, a throbbing boom that you feel in your chest. These are the kinds of impromptu conversations one has here.

I went to Rusafa in the back of an armoured vehicle. I had to tell the gunner my blood type before we set out — it wasn’t your typical taxi ride. (Rusafa, by the way, is the part of Baghdad on the eastern side of the Euphrates. Karkh is the western half. It’s confusing because both are also the names of specific neighborhoods. The Green Zone is on the Karkh side of the river and also in the Karkh neighbourhood.) The criminal court in Rusafa processes Iraqi-held prisoners, while the criminal court I visited yesterday processes coalition-held prisoners.

Rusafa is also the site of a new lawyers defense clinic, paid for by the US Government, which should be up and running in a few weeks. While there, I talked to JAG officers and the civilian administrators about some of their projects. They assist Iraqi authorities in investigating major crimes. (For example, someone in Basra has killed about 100 women for dressing immodestly.) The investigative teams partner with the Iraqis, but stay out of the courtrooms.

One rule of law topic that I’ve been meaning to bring up is the Iraqi amnesty law, which was passed in February. This is a big deal here. Any Iraqi-held prisoner - and there are officially about 30,000 - qualifies for amnesty unless he is accused of one of a handful of what Americans would call capital crimes, such as murder and rape. Also, if a detainee has been held for six months without seeing an investigative judge, or 12 months without seeing a trial judge, he qualifies. (Many Iraqi detainees have been held for years without seeing a judge.)

The amnesty law seems cut-and-dried, but implementation is another matter. On my return trip from Rusafa, I sat in the back of an armoured vehicle with a US Department of Justice official who is charged with helping the Iraqis implement the law. A few hundred prisoners have been released under the law, he said, but there are challenges. To apply, a prisoner, family member or lawyer needs to fill out the proper paperwork. An early problem - police were either selling the forms or simply refusing to distribute them.

There are also sectarian concerns — a Shiite prisoner might receive preferential treatment over a Sunni or vice versa. An Iraqi review committee is currently looking at thousands of applications and case files to determine who qualifies. Meanwhile, the trial courts have ground to practically a stop.