A release suspended

“I want the money today,” is a message that keeps coming up on Fahd Saad Radhi’s phone, reminding him of his recent experience in Abu Ghraib prison, from which he waited in vain to be released, even though he had completed his “sentence”.

Radhi was sentenced to two years in jail for burglary in 2021, and was sent to Baghdad Central Prison, known as Abu Ghraib. He should have been released on the basis of a ruling in December 2022, but this did not happen.

Ten days after the ruling, he lodged a complaint with the legal department of the prison, but to no avail. Instead he was transferred from Abu Ghraib to “Tasfirat” Prison – known as the “common” prison – where he ran up against the same bureaucratic measures, which prevented him from being released.

During the month and a half he spent inside Tasfirat, Radhi was subjected to blackmail. He was asked to pay $500 up front to get out of jail, and then make a second payment, the sum of which was to be determined after his release. No sooner had Radhi paid the money and left prison than he was bombarded with calls and messages demanding the second payment.

In this report, we document the cases of six current or former detainees who remained in jail even though they had completed their sentences, allegedly because the process of releasing them was time consuming. Meanwhile they were all subjected to financial blackmailing to which they had no option but to submit to, hoping thereby to speed up the procedures necessary to secure their release. In the case of a prisoner who has completed his sentence, these procedures entail notifying the Correctional Department of the Ministry of Justice, the judicial authorities and the Ministry of Interior to ensure that he is not being sought or been convicted in connection with any other case before he is released.

Despite the adoption in 2018 of the Prisoner Correction Law - which obliges the Correctional Department to ascertain the criminal status of prisoners during the first month of their detention, to ensure their prompt release on completion of their sentence - this report reveals that this law is still not being adhered to in Iraqi prisons.

It is difficult to be sure how many people remain stranded in jail in Iraq, given the lack of official estimates. But human rights campaigners and parliamentarians agree that there are many held illegally in jails across the country.

Kadhim Albidhani, deputy director of Al Monqith, a branch of the Justice Network for Prisoners - an umbrella group of organisation and activists – asserts that 60% of those in jail are being held even though they have completed their sentences. He says that the ministry has recently taken steps to reduce this percentage but that resolving the issue requires a lot of effort. Omar al-Farhan, head of the Iraqi War Crimes Documentation Centre estimates that 80% of all prisoners are subjected to financial haggling (to pay certain sums of money) to speed up the bureaucratic procedures necessary for their release.

Haidar Muntassir has sought refuge in Turkey from the painful memories of the eight years he spent in Iraqi prisons, three of them after his release order was issued. Muntassir went to prison in 2007 on kidnapping charges but appeared before a judge only after three years, during which time he was subjected to various types of torture. Muntassir was sentenced to life imprisonment, but the appeal court ordered his release in 2015. After this court order, Muntassir expected to be freed, but was surprised to face continued bureaucratic procedures which meant he spent five months being transferred from one jail to another.

Muntassir says that during this time his lawyer entered into negotiations via a broker with an official in the prison over payment of $1600,00, to secure his release. No sooner had the deal been completed and the broker had received the money than all bureaucratic red tapes were suddenly resolved and Muntassir was released, after which he decided to emigrate to Turkey.

Even though Muntassir’s case preceded the adoption of the Prisoner Correction Law, any person who prevents a prisoner from being released after the conclusion of their sentence would still be accountable and could be pursued for their criminal act. According to lawyer and legal expert Ali al-Tamimi, the new law is the culmination of a series of legal measures designed to curb abuse in prisons.

Al-Tamimi thinks that deliberately delaying release of prisoners after the expiry of their sentence is not only a breach of the law and the constitution, but a crime for which the perpetrator should be punished under laws in force in Iraq.

To verify whether prisoners are being held beyond the end of their sentences, we followed up the case of Muhammad Karrar (not his real name), a detainee in Abu Ghraib. According to his case documents his sentence ended three months ago, yet he remains behind bars. At first his family expected his release would come once the routine procedures were completed, but after waiting a long time the family decided to enquire about the date their son would be released, but they received no reply.

Another prisoner then contacted Karrar and told him that “unknown officials” had insisted on receiving a sum of money in exchange for his release.

The family were too poor to afford to pay the money demanded, so their son remains behind bars for an unspecified time awaiting a release date.

Karrar’s case is similar to that of Hassan Abd al-Hamid, detained in “Al-Diwaniyah 193” prison south of Baghdad. We have obtained audio recordings of Abd al-Hamid appealing to be released, after the court had acquitted him four months previously of burglary charges, for which he had been detained in 2022.

In these recordings, Abd al-Hamid refuses to reveal with whom he is negotiating his release for fear of punishment, but he does not conceal the fact that the reason he continues to be detained is his inability to pay the sum of money demanded.

In order to find out how the blackmail and bargaining process works, we contacted one of the brokers and this reporter posed as someone wanting to pay money in exchange for the release of a relative.

Despite his extreme caution, the broker revealed there was a group of prison officials who demanded money through him in exchange for speeding up release procedures.

The information we obtained corroborates testimony given by Yasir Ahmad Hassan, a former guard at Abu Ghraib, about the procedure for releasing prisoners whose sentences have expired. Hassan described a network of brokers inside the prison, each seeking their share of the money the detainee pays in exchange for accelerating the release process. Hassan says he himself witnessed the release of prisoners being deliberately delayed in order to obtain money from their families.

This former guard said that the way the system works is that the relatives of the prisoner are contacted, by some means or other, from inside the prison in order to begin the negotiation process. If they pay up, the process will proceed smoothly. But if they are unable to pay, the release of the prisoner would be held up indefinitely.

Three months was the period Shayma spent inside “Site Four” women’s prison, even though her sentence had ended in 2019. When we met this former detainee, she told us that, during her time in prison, her family had been subject to several forms of blackmail. “One of the guards asked my family for a phone number in order to keep them updated on my release. But my family received calls from an unidentified number in which the caller asked for two thousand dollars in return for progressing the paperwork to obtain my release,” she said.

Human Rights Watch indicated, in a 2014 report, that Iraqi women prisoners were not being released and instead kept in prison for long periods. A report from the Iraqi High Commission For Human Rights (IHCHR) – a semi-government institution that replaced the Ministry of Human Rights – also condemned the “unjustified delay” in freeing those who had completed their sentences on the pretext that there was no appeal decision (a court ruling either overturning or confirming a previous ruling); or because there was no confirmation that the prisoner was not sought in connection with another case; or because forensic procedures such as fingerprinting, had not been completed. This is in violation of the Prisoner Correction Law.

The IHCHR report also catalogues instances of abuse. It blames the delay in deciding the conditional release of those convicted of offences on the fact that the Correctional Department enquires into the detainee’s criminal status only just before their release date, or even after it. The Correctional Department of the Ministry of Justice then sends detainees back to the police stations where they had been arrested for them to be released there. But what happens in fact is the start of a process of “endless bargaining” by detainees to obtain their release.

We obtained testimony from someone employed in the general administration of the Correctional Department, who refused to be named. He said that the process by which the department wrote to police agencies to inquire about the prisoner’s criminal status is delayed for weeks or months for no reason. He said he met relatives of prisoners on a daily basis who complained that their sons were being kept in prison without any legal justification and who feared they could come to harm, given the poor conditions in Iraqi jails.

The Iraqi Ministry of Justice has announced that prison overcrowding has reached 300% of capacity, i.e., more than 60,000 detainees are being held in prisons with a maximum capacity of 25,000. The Ministry of Justice also reveals that of the 60,000 Iraqi prison population, spread across 28 jails, only 20,000 have been convicted of an offence. This overcrowding only adds to the existing crises in Iraqi jails over bad food and poor hygiene, according to the findings of a report by Arshad Al Salihi, head of parliament’s Human Rights Committee, after he visited a number of prisons in Baghdad.

Member of parliament Nissan al-Zayer also identified this overcrowding during her visit to “Al-Taji” Central Prison during May 2023. And she put it down to delayed release of prisoners who had completed their sentences. Al-Zayer told us that parliament’s Human Rights Committee had tried repeatedly to find out the reasons for this delay but had received no reply from the Correctional Department or the government.

The most striking aspect of this is that sometimes prisoners die in jail, with no cause of death being given. This is what happened to Muayyad al-Fahdawi, who completed his sentence for financial fraud in 2020. After three months of continued detention, his family were shocked to learn than he had died.

His brother Muhannad al-Fahdawi recalls that they were on their way to the prison in a renewed attempt to have the release order implemented, but were shocked to be given the news of his brother’s death. Muhannad says he asked a prison official how his brother had died but received no answer.

We contacted the Ministry of Justice, the body responsible for carrying out release orders, and presented them with this evidence of failures to adhere to the Prisoner Correction Law. The ministry spokesperson, Kamil Amin, attributed the time-lag in implementing release orders both to the delay in police stations or the National Security Service (NSS) taking charge of prisoners transferred from correctional services, and to the hold-up in conditional releases, which require the approval of a judge responsible for the release.

Faced with the cases of blackmail we had documented, Amin did not deny that such cases existed, but said they were limited individual instances that did not amount to a trend. Concerning the delay in submitting requests for a prisoner’s criminal status until shortly before the release date – in contravention of the Prisoner Correction Law – Amin blamed a gap in the law itself, since some prisoners spent many years in prison, during which time other charges could have been brought against them. Amin said that the Ministry of Justice and the Iraqi judiciary had agreed to delay submitting these requests until six months before the end of sentence, to ensure that the individual was not wanted in connection with other cases.

The spokesperson said that the Ministry of Justice was in the process of implementing an electronic system to resolve the problem of delayed release by documenting the handover to the relevant authorities of prisoners whose sentences had expired.

Human rights lawyer Ali al-Tamimi rejects the “excuses” given by the ministry for the delay in releasing prisoners, pointing out that the law makes it a criminal offence to detain any citizen without legal justification, for even one day. Though the Ministry of Justice states that there are only limited cases of continued detention without legal justification, Karrar, Hassan and many others continue to appeal for help in gaining their right to liberty, which Radi and Muntassir were forced to pay money to obtain.