UK court denies public inquiry into Iraq detainee abuse

[JURIST] A UK High Court on Tuesday denied an appeal from Iraqi citizens to open a single public inquiry into allegations of abuse by members of the British Armed Forces. The Public Interest Lawyers (PIL), the group representing a group of more than140 Iraqis, appealed to the High Court after Defence Secretary Liam Fox refused [...]

British Troops Accused of Abusing Iraqi Detainees

The NY Times reports that a lawyer for 200 Iraqis demanding a public inquiry into what they have described as brutal mistreatment by British soldiers in a secret detention center near Basra told the High Court in London on Friday that the abuse amounted to “Britain’s Abu Ghraib.” The assertion was buttressed with video recordings [...]

Iraq Broadcasts Confessions By Al Qaeda Insurgents

Two men arrested in Iraq over suicide bomb attacks on embassies and a foreign television office were shown on state TV Sunday confessing that they worked for al Qaeda. The confessions, broadcast widely on several local channels, were aired at a time when Iraqi forces are under pressure to demonstrate their ability to fight insurgents [...]

77,000 Iraqis killed from 2004 to August 2008, U.S. military says

The U.S. military released its most detailed compilation of data on Iraqi casualties during more than four years of the Iraq  war, reporting that 63,185 civilians and 13,754 members of the country’s security forces were killed from the beginning of 2004 through August 2008. The casualty figures released by the United States are lower than [...]

AI Report: Iraq unlawfully detaining and torturing thousands

(JURIST) According to a report by Amnesty International (AI), the Iraqi government is unlawfully detaining and torturing more than 30,000 detainees. The report, “New Order, Same Abuses: Unlawful Detention in Iraq“, accuses Iraq of torturing detainees during interrogations in order to obtain confessions, which are then used as evidence against them. Furthermore, an increasing number [...]

Transfer of US biometric database to Iraq raises concerns

Over the past seven years, US soldiers in Iraq have used sweeping wartime powers to collect fingerprints, iris scans, and even DNA from ordinary people and suspected insurgents, an effort that has helped the Pentagon amass one of the world’s most comprehensive databases of biometric information collected during a war. Nearly 7 percent of Iraq’s [...]

Obama declares that combat In Iraq is over

President Obama announced the end of the combat mission in Iraq and discussed the future of the U.S. commitment to helping build a stable Iraq in an address to the nation from the Oval Office. Going forward, a transitional force of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq  with a different mission:  advising and assisting Iraq’s [...]

Ex MI5 chief: Iraq war raised terror threat

Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Baroness Manningham-Buller, chief of the intelligence agency from 2002 to 2007 said that Iraq posed little threat to Britain just before the 2003 war — but the danger of extremist attacks surged following the conflict. She also dismissed any connection between Iraq and the September 11, 2001 attacks on [...]

UK Supreme Court rules against extraterritorial application of the HRA

The UK Supreme Court ruled (judgment; summary) on Wednesday 30 June that British troops deployed abroad are not protected by the 1998 Human Rights Act (which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into English law), and that soldiers are not automatically entitled to inquests arising from deaths in foreign conflicts. The case, R (Smith) [...]

Marine jailed for war crimes released

A US marine convicted of war crimes in Iraq has been released from prison pending an appellate court’s review of his case. Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins was sentenced to 11 years in prison for killing an Iraqi civilian in the town of Hamdania in 2006. But a military appeals court in Washington has ruled that Hutchings [...]