Shafaq News- Erbil

A total of 544 inmates in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) have received death sentences that remain suspended, the Director-General of Correctional Facilities, Ihsan Abdul Rahman, said on Saturday.

In a press conference on abolishing the death penalty and suspending executions, organized by the Prisoners’ Alliance Network and the Human Rights Association in the Kurdistan Region in cooperation with government institutions, Abdul Rahman said that the oldest pending case involves a woman sentenced to death in 1992 after being convicted of killing several members of her family. She has remained at the women’s correctional facility in Erbil for 34 years without the sentence being carried out.

The Kurdistan Region, he added, operates six correctional facilities holding about 6,400 inmates. Around 2,000 people are detained or serving sentences in cases involving drug use or trafficking —roughly one-third of the prison population. Six rehabilitation centers have also opened for people detained in drug-related cases and have received 1,135 people so far.

“More centers are needed to steer drug users away from criminal penalties and help reintegrate them into society.”

Retired judge and lawyer Rizgar Mohammed Amin said that abolishing capital punishment has become a legal commitment in many developed countries, while some Arab and Asian states continue to impose it because of the severity of certain crimes.

Although courts in the Kurdistan Region issue death sentences, executions are not carried out. “Keeping prisoners under death sentences without carrying them out has created difficulties within correctional facilities,” he said, adding that the Kurdistan Region also remains subject to Iraqi laws governing sentence enforcement and scrutiny from international and human rights organizations.