May 10, 2007
Another miscarriage of justice in the Muslim Middle East
Last year the world was shocked when a sharia court in Afghanistan sentenced Abdul Rahman, a Christian convert, to death for apostasy. (Rahman’s life was saved when outcries from the West compelled the Afghan government to allow him to emigrate to Italy.) But this was just the tip of the iceberg. A cursory perusal of the headlines reveals faulty jurisprudence throughout the Middle East.
This is especially true when women are involved. In Jordan, men are regularly acquitted when they kill female relatives in “honor killings.” In Pakistan, women who accuse men of rape can themselves be charged with adultery---if they cannot produce the four male witnesses or eight female witnesses required by sharia. As most readers will know, our “ally” Saudi Arabia does not even allow women to drive.
Now we have an example from Iraq---the country that has so far cost the United States over $400 billion and 3,000 lives. CNN reports that Samar Saed Abdullah, a 25-year-old Iraqi woman, was sentenced to death by hanging, for the murders of her cousin and two other family members. On the day her relatives were killed, Samar’s husband robbed the family and fled with $1,000. But Iraqi police arrested Samar. Then they beat her until she confessed to the murders. She was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in one day. At the time of this writing, she awaits her appointment with the gallows.
Here are some excerpts from the CNN story:
"I am innocent," she [Samar] told CNN from inside the al-Kadhimiya Women's Prison in Baghdad. "The judge did not hear me out. He refused to hear anything I have to say. He just sentenced me….."
“She didn't confess," her mother, Hana'a Abdul Hakim, told CNN. "It was from the beating they gave her. She was bleeding. She finally said write what you want, just stop…”
Under Iraqi law, her claim to confessing under torture should have been investigated, but it wasn't. CNN's repeated queries to the Higher Judicial Council and the Ministry of Justice went unanswered.
"The judiciary is no longer involved, and nothing can be done unless new evidence comes to light, which is unlikely," her appeals lawyer, Ali Azzawi, said. ---CNN
This should be no surprise, considering the history of Iraq. Even before the Ba’ath Party took power in the 1960s, Iraq’s judicial system was violent and mercurial by Western standards. In the Saddam era, the feared Mukhabarat terrorized the population, killing thousands of real and imagined enemies of the regime. The new powers-that-be seem to be proceeding with business as usual. So much for the Iraqi concept of “democracy.”