Iraq: Human Rights Activist Disappeared For a Year by State Sponsored Militia

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On 19 August 2015, Waee Al Jabouri, lawyer and head of a human rights NGO, left his house in the morning and never came back. He disappeared after his arrest at a nearby checkpoint of the State sponsored militia Liwa Al Sadr. Concerned over his case, Alkarama and the Iraqi Observatory for Human Rights sent his case to the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) hoping that this mechanism for the protection for human rights will help locate him.

Al Jabouri, a 54-year-old lawyer and head of the NGO Human Rights Advisory Council, is well known for being the main organiser of the demonstrations against corruption in his region in the Babil Governorate when people were routinely taking the street all over the country to protest over poor living conditions.

On 19 August 2015 at around 9.30 am, Al Jabouri left his house in Al Hashimia in the city of Hilla, Babil Governorate, to go to the offices of the Human Rights Advisory Council in Baghdad. He was stopped and arrested at a nearby checkpoint controlled by the Liwa Al Sadr militia. The armed group is part of the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU), an umbrella organisation reuniting more than 40 militias under the authority of the Ministry of Interior. The Iraqi government considers it as an official force in its fight against the Islamic State (IS) and provides its members with their salaries as well as weapons and equipment.

Al Jabouri's closest collaborators, friends and family, strongly believe he was arrested and disappeared as a retaliation for his activism, as only a couple of days before his arrest he had met with several other activists to prepare a demonstration.

Al Jabouri's family could not obtain any information on his fate and whereabouts from their inquiries at the local police. Informal accounts, however, referred that he would be detained in a military camp in the north of Babil and belonging to the Hezbollah Brigade, another militia part of the PMU.

"It is notorious that the PMU are perpetrators of serious human rights violations in Iraq and are responsible for hundreds of disappearances, such as Al Jabouri's. The Iraqi authorities must stop turning a blind eye under the pretext of the fight against terrorism," says Inès Osman, Legal Officer for the Mashreq at Alkarama. "The Iraqi authorities have a legal obligation to ensure that all persons who were forcibly disappeared and whose fate is not yet known are searched for, located and put in contact with their families without delay, as demanded by the CED in its recommendations issued following its review of the country in September 2015."

For more information or an interview, please contact media@alkarama.org (Dir: +41 22 734 1008).