Shafaq News – Erbil

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has begun drafting a comprehensive plan to strengthen human rights protections in the Region, in coordination with local and international organizations, an official said on Tuesday.

Dindar Zebari, the KRG’s Coordinator for the Office of International Advocacy (OCIA), said in a press conference that authorities in the Kurdistan Region have arrested 4,600 people under anti-narcotics laws, with drug traffickers accounting for 60% of those detained.

Zebari also pointed out that authorities have intensified efforts against ISIS, compiling about 400,000 pages of legal documentation on the group’s crimes and transferring more than 500 gigabytes of digital data to the federal government in Baghdad. “Courts are currently processing around 1,200 terrorism cases, including 600 death sentences, alongside ongoing enforcement of life imprisonment rulings.”

The Region continues to host around 800,000 refugees and internally displaced people, while efforts remain underway to implement the Sinjar Agreement to normalize conditions in the district despite persistent on-the-ground challenges, he added.

Regarding public freedoms, authorities have introduced new measures to strengthen access to information, with around 3,400 journalists currently active across the Region, he indicated.

On the economic front, the Kurdish official said that Kurdistan hosts approximately 4,800 production factories, employing hundreds of thousands of local workers, in addition to about 90,000 foreign workers across multiple sectors, according to Zebari.

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He noted that the Region participated as part of Iraq’s official delegation at global human rights forums, adding that out of 263 recommendations issued to Iraq by the UN Human Rights Council, authorities committed to implementing 183.