United Nations human rights officials have said that speeding up the execution of accused militants could result in the deaths of innocent people. The government has stopped providing information on executions, and human rights investigators suspect that many go unrecorded. The prison is believed to have about 6,000 prisoners on death row, Agnes Callamard, a United Nations human rights expert monitoring extrajudicial executions, said in an email. “Everybody has a public defense lawyer, but it does not appear that they are engaging in the trial,” said Belkis Wille, Human Rights Watch’s senior Iraq researcher. There was no difference between a cook for the Islamic State or a fighter, a counterterrorism court judge told Ms. Wille.

Source: New York Times December 15, 2017 23:20 UTC