Iraq's government has been carrying out mass arrests and unlawfully detaining people in the notorious Camp Honor prison facility in Baghdad's Green Zone for the past six months, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) alleged on Tuesday, based on numerous interviews with victims, witnesses, family members and government officials.
Camp Honor is a military base of more than 15 buildings within Baghdad's fortified International Zone, which Iraqis and others continue to refer to as the Green Zone.
The Iraqi government had claimed a year ago that it had closed the prison, where the New York-based human rights watchdog had documented rampant torture.
Since October 2011 Iraqi authorities have conducted several waves of detentions, one of which arresting officers and officials termed as "precautionary." Numerous witnesses told HRW that security forces had typically surrounded neighborhoods in Baghdad and other provinces and gone door-to-door with long lists of names of people they wanted to detain. The government has held hundreds of detainees for months, refusing to disclose the number of those detained, their identities, any charges against them, and where they are being held.
"Iraqi security forces are grabbing people outside of the law, without trial or known charges, and hiding them away in incommunicado sites," said Joe Stork, Deputy Middle East Director at HRW.
He urged the Iraqi government to "immediately reveal the names and locations of all detainees, promptly free those not charged with crimes, and bring those facing charges before an independent judicial authority."
The government should appoint an independent judicial commission to investigate continuing allegations of torture and other ill-treatment, disappearances, and arbitrary detention in Camp Honor and elsewhere, HRW said.
Multiple witnesses told HRW that some detainees arrested since December 2011 had been held in the Camp Honor prison. In March, 2011 the government announced it had closed Camp Honor after legislators visited the site in response to evidence HRW provided of repeated torture at the facility.
The two most sweeping arrest dragnets occurred in October and November 2011, detaining people alleged to be Baath Party and Saddam Hussein loyalists, and in March 2012, ahead of the Arab summit in Baghdad at the end of that month.
In April two Justice Ministry officials separately told HRW that since the roundups began in October, security forces often had not transferred prisoners into the full custody of the justice system, as required by Iraqi law. Instead, the officials said, security forces transported dozens of prisoners at a time in and out of various prison facilities, sometimes without adequate paperwork or explanation, under the authority of the military office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
Fourteen lawyers, detainees, and government officials interviewed by HRW said detainees had also been held at two secret detention facilities, also inside Baghdad's Green Zone. These allegations are consistent with concerns raised in a confidential letter from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) obtained by HRW in July, 2011 after the letter's existence was made public by the Los Angeles Times.
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