On 23 September 2015, Alkarama and Al Wissam Humanitarian Assembly sent a communication to the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) regarding the case of construction worker, Salam Al Dulaimi, who disappeared in December 2013 following his arrest in the city of Al-Baghdadi by members of the Iraqi Federal Police.
On 15 December 2013, 24-year-old Al Dulaimi was working on a construction site in the city of Khan Al Baghdadi, in the Al Anbar Governorate, when members of the Iraqi Federal Police stormed in his workplace, arresting him and some of his colleagues without providing any arrest warrants or giving reasons for their respective arrests, before taking them to an unknown location.
An elderly woman, Al Dulaimi's mother did not file any complaint with the Iraqi authorities regarding her son's disappearance, fearing that Al Dulaimi's wife and children would suffer the same fate if left alone in the house. Left with no other recourse, Al Dulaimi's family contacted Al Wissam Humanitarian Assembly – an Iraqi human rights organisation documenting cases of disappearances – as well as Alkarama, in the hope that the human rights organisations could help locate and release him.
In view of these facts, the two human rights NGOs seized the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED), asking this UN special procedure on human rights to ask the Iraqi authorities to release Al Dulaimi immediately or, at the very least, to put him under the protection of the law by disclosing his whereabouts and allowing his family to visit him without restriction.
Concerned over the pattern of widespread and systematic practice of enforced disappearances in Iraq documented over the past few years, Alkarama recently submitted a report to the CED with a view to provide the UN experts with detailed information on the practice of enforced disappearances in Iraq. After considering the information received from NGOs and engaging in a constructive dialogue with the State during the CED's 9th session on 7 and 8 September 2015, the Committee's members called upon the Iraqi authorities to implement the following recommendations as a matter of priority:
- To incorporate the crime of enforced disappearance into domestic law as an autonomous offence, in line with the definition contained in Article 2 of the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICCPED), binding upon Iraq by virtue of its accession in November 2010;
- To adopt all the necessary measures to ensure that no person is held in secret detention, including by guaranteeing that all persons deprived of liberty are afforded, since the outset of their deprivation of liberty, all the fundamental legal safeguards provided under Article 17 ICCPED; and
- To ensure that all persons who were forcibly disappeared and whose fate is not yet known are searched for and located without delay.
For more information or an interview, please contact the media team at media@alkarama.org (Dir: +41 22 734 1008).