Contact Admin. In May , Hanan al-Fadl not her real name was grocery shopping in a market in central Baghdad when security forces dressed in civilian clothing seized her, bundled her into a car, and drove her to the office of a state institution, she told Human Rights Watch. There, she said, they beat her, shocked her with electric cables, and drenched her in cold water in an effort to force her to admit that she had taken a bribe.
Hanan, a manager at a state-affiliated company that approves construction projects, said she realized she was paying the price for refusing to waive through a project in which the contractor had used sub-standard materials. After holding her for more than a day, security forces took her to a judge, who refused to acknowledge bruises and swelling on her face, she said. She did not have a lawyer.
Hanan is one of thousands of Iraqis imprisoned by a judicial system plagued by torture and rampant corruption. There are far fewer women than men in Iraqi prisons. They estimated the male prison population to be over 40, Both men and women suffer from the severe flaws of the criminal justice system.
But women suffer a double burden due to their second class status in Iraqi society. According to witness accounts and to information numerous civil society activists and international nongovernmental organizations NGOs provided to Human Rights Watch, women are frequently targeted not only for crimes they themselves are said to have committed, but to harass male family or tribal members. Furthermore, once they have been detained, and even if they are released unharmed, women are frequently stigmatized by their family or tribe, who perceive them to have been dishonored.
As one human rights activist said: In response to the media reports and to subsequent mass protests against the treatment of women in detention, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced in January that he would task Deputy Prime Minister Hussein al-Shahristani with overseeing reforms to the criminal justice system. But a year later, the government has not made desperately needed reforms, and the justice system remains plagued by corruption and abuses against women from all sects, classes, and regions.
