Shock UN Report on Conditions in Camp Liberty, Baghdad

Shock UN Report on Conditions in Camp Liberty, Baghdad

Struan Stevenson, MEP
President of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq
July 26, 2012

The publication of a report by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is deeply shocking and an indictment of the Iraqi Government and its treatment of the 2000 refugees in Camp Liberty near Baghdad. The report notes that the residents were subjected to humiliating searches, headcounts and long delays when they transferred from their former home in Camp Ashraf. They were denied personal belongings such as wheelchairs and medicines. They are now being held in appalling conditions with inadequate water, sewage facilities or electricity generation. They are denied the right to leave Camp Liberty, despite their recognised international status as asylum seekers and refugees. Lawyers and politicians have been denied access to Camp Liberty. The UN Working Group describes Camp Liberty as a prison in all but name, which is in direct contradiction to the assurances we have received in the European Parliament from the UN Special Representative in Iraq Martin Kobler and US State Department Ambassador Dan Fried, who have gone out of their way to support the Iraqi Government and criticise the Iranian residents in Ashraf and Liberty.

The UN report also comes in the wake of a leaked document which has exposed the fact that an offer to move residents from Camp Liberty to the Yamamah Hotel in Baghdad was in fact a trap. The hotel has been rented by the Iranian regime’s embassy in Baghdad since the beginning of 2011. Had any of the Iranian dissidents from Camp Liberty moved there, they would have faced extradition to Iran and certain torture and execution. In such circumstances it is almost unbelievable that the UN Special Representative to Iraq – Martin Kobler and Ambassador Dan Fried both strongly recommended that even disabled residents should move from Camp Liberty to the Yamamah Hotel.

I and other senior members of the European Parliament are deeply disturbed by these reports and alarmed that a UN Working Group has now openly and directly contradicted its key special envoy in Iraq. These events reaffirm my determination to insist on UN and US intervention at the highest level to sort out this shambles, force the Iraqi authorities to fulfil their commitments to humanitarian treatment of the residents of Ashraf and Liberty and speed up the re-settlement of these people to safe countries outside Iraq. Until such assurances are received and evidence of their implementation on the ground can be witnessed, I will not recommend any further transfers from Camp Ashraf to Camp Liberty.

ENDS

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