Ironically, the new law, via Article 14, tried to keep the mechanism of appointment and retirement outside of the state’s official and administrative controls. But that was the cause of the popular tension against retired state officials in the first place.
The new law stipulates that an “employee appointed by a presidential decree, by order of the council of ministers, by the prime minister, or by the board of the parliament speaker, should be referred to retirement in the manner in he was appointed.”
Moreover, the law includes other loopholes that would allow granting pensions to those who don’t deserve them. Article 39 stipulates that “as an exception to the provisions of this law, and after a proposal from the president or the prime minister and the endorsement of parliament, a pension of no more than 2,000,000 Iraqi dinars [$1,772] is allocated to Iraqi national figures (or their children) as provided in this law in the event of their death if they did not have a state salary or if their pension was less than 2,000,000 dinars. Standards and mechanisms for determining who is a national firgure should be set.”
Of course, the concept of “national figures” is very loose. And the law itself didn’t specify who will put the controls that determine who are the “national figures.” Is it the cabinet or the parliament?
But looking at the pension law only in terms of its negatives and the objections against it is unfair. The new law raises the minimum monthly pension salary to 400,000 Iraqi dinars (about $350), and this is an important achievement for the support of the poor, who have suffered over the past years. Also, the law has put less stringent controls on several loopholes for the methods of calculating the length of service and for adding the years of schooling and military service to public service. The law did justice to the victims of violence and to political prisoners and others.
All in all, the law is fair for the majority of the Iraqi people. That doesn’t mean condoning the law’s unfair clauses. In the past few days, some of the political forces that passed the law have criticized those clauses.
That will be rich material for the political and electoral debate in Iraq in the coming weeks.
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