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In December 2015, following its fifth review of Iraq, the United Nations Human Rights Committee (HR Committee) issued four priority recommendations to be implemented within one year.

On October 5, 2017, Kuwait’s Constitutional Court repealed Law No. 78/2015 on compulsory DNA collection, declaring that some of its provisions contravened the rights to privacy and personal liberty enshrined in articles 30 and 31 of the Kuwaiti Constitution.

According to the Kuwaiti authorities, the law was introduced in August 2015 as a direct response to the deadly terrorist attack on the Imam Sadiq mosque in Kuwait city on June 26, 2015, in which 27 people were killed and more than 200 wounded.

On October 4, 2017, Rasha Al Husseini, secretary to former Vice President Tariq Al Hashimi, was released after the Central Criminal Court in Baghdad decided to drop the charges held against her. Al Husseini was arrested on December 27, 2011, as part of a wave of arrests which targeted individuals believed to be close to the former vice president.

After being disappeared for two months and subjected to torture and ill-treatment over the course of his three-month detention, Ramsi Suleiman, a 39-year-old pharmacist, was released without charge on August 17, 2017 from the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) premises in Amman.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) has issued an Opinion calling for the immediate release of 20-year-old Hatem Al Darawsheh, who is currently detained in a maximum-security prison following an unfair trial before Jordan’s State Security Court (SSC).

On September 26, 2017, Alkarama requested the urgent action of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Michel Forst, regarding the cases of two prominent Saudi human rights defenders who have been arrested in retaliation for their peaceful activism.

On September 21, 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) formally adopted its third round of recommendations to Bahrain in the framework of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a process aimed at assessing the human rights record of each UN Member State every four years.

Update: On October 26, 2017, the law entered into force following its publication in the Official Gazette.

On September 15, 2017, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) issued an Opinion on the case of a Lebanese citizen, Ahmed Mekkaoui, in which the UN experts qualified his detention as arbitrary and called for his immediate release.

On September 22, 2017, Alkarama and Al Wissam Humanitarian Assembly submitted seven cases of enforced disappearances in Iraq to the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED).

These seven cases are only the tip of a much larger iceberg in a country where the practice of enforced disappearances is widespread and systematic, and the rate of missing people remains one of the highest worldwide.

Two brothers and their cousin forcibly disappeared in Samarra