The Committee last reviewed Iraq’s compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 2019. This report addresses Iraq’s compliance with the Convention as it pertains to issues related to the death penalty, which the Committee did not specifically address in its 2019 Concluding Observations.

Iraq has neither abolished the death penalty nor implemented a moratorium on executions. Iraqi law does not limit the death penalty to the most serious crimes.

In Iraq, women are exposed to discrimination in the judicial process leading to the death penalty. Since 2019, Iraqi courts have sentenced at least 397 people to death, 1 and as of the end of 2023, Iraqi authorities held at least 8,421 people under sentence of death.2 Authorities do not disclose gender-disaggregated data on the number of women sentenced to death. In Iraqi Kurdistan, there are more than 550 people under sentence of death, including 33 women.3 As of August 2014 (the most recently available gender-disaggregated data), there were 25 women on death row in Iraq out of 1,724 death-sentenced prisoners, or about 1.4%. 4 The lack of disaggregated data prevents detailed analysis of the gender bias at work in the application of capital punishment and the protection of the rights of women facing the death penalty.