Iraq: MP urges general amnesty bill to release thousands of innocent people

An Iraqi MP has urged Prime Minister Muhammad Shayya Al-Sudani to send the general amnesty bill to parliament for a vote to free innocent people from prison. Adel Khamis Al-Mahlawi noted that “thousands” are still in prison as a result of false intelligence provided by so-called “secret informants”.

“A few days ago, the Rusafa Criminal Court [in Baghdad] sentenced a secret informant to ten years in prison, which confirms that thousands of innocent people are in prison as a result of false information provided by this person,” Al-Mahlawi told journalists. He explained that in 2014 the Supreme Judicial Council issued an official statement explaining that the “secret informant” system causes many problems and inflicts injustice on citizens.

The head of the council at the time, Medhat Al-Mahmoud, pointed out that 498 secret informants in Baghdad alone had been referred to the judiciary on charges of “false reporting”, said Al-Mahlawi.

“The security and intelligence services continue to rely on false reports provided by secret informants in their evaluation of citizens and keep them in their database, putting the victims in a suspicious position and depriving many young people of the chance of joining the security and intelligence services based solely on misleading information,” the MP added.

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