Perhaps the most important and potentially controversial aspect of the bill is the creation of a committee that will oversee the law and hand over potential cases to the prosecution. This committee will be headed by the minister of state for parliamentary affairs, with members from the ministries of justice and human rights, the head of the consultative state assembly and two judges. As is well known, the minister of state for parliamentary affairs and the ministries of human rights and justice (which also administers the consultative state assembly) are all dominated by members of the grand Shiite alliance to which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki owes his second term. Of course, this all comes at a time when there is already evidence that vague accusations of Baathism are being used to settle political scores.
The law then goes on to stipulate severe prison terms – mostly in the range from five to ten years – for offenders. In this section it also goes beyond the constitutionally mandated focus on political parties to also define punishment for government official discrimination on sectarian or racist grounds. There is also specific mention of the crime of forcing someone to leave his or her home for “sectarian, religious or nationalist” reasons.
The biggest problem with the draft law is the combination of vague criteria (what exactly constitutes “racism”?) and the designation of a supervisory committee that inevitably will be seen as political. For example, some of the claims by the two biggest Kurdish parties to annex to the Kurdish region outlying areas where minorities of Kurds live can hardly be defined as anything other than “racism”. Similarly, the tendency of some parties to define certain governmental posts as belonging to particular ethnicities, be they Kurds or Arabs, would also seem to constitute racism. It is noteworthy that in line with the constitution, sectarianism is not outlawed as such, only sectarian cleansing.
The full details of today’s debate regarding the first reading have yet to be published. It will be interesting to see which Iraqi deputy dares to be the first to demand ethnic quotas for the committee overseeing the anti-racism bill.
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