Iraq human rights dossier: main points

Torture

Torture is "systematic" in Iraq and the most of the country's senior figures are involved.

A revolutionary command council decree guarantees immunity for ruling party members who cause damage to property, bodily harm or death when pursuing enemies of the regime.

Amputation of the tongue became the penalty for slander or abusive remarks about the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, or his family in 2000.

BBC correspondent John Sweeney reported from northern Iraq on child torture, telling the story of a former agent whose daughter's feet were half-crushed when he came under suspicion for a bungled assassination attempt on President Saddam's eldest son.

That son, Uday, runs his own torture chamber (al-Ghurfa al-Hamra - the Red Room) on the banks of the river Tigris. He has personally executed dissidents and tortured the national football team after it lost a World Cup qualifying match.

Iraqi law forbids the use of torture but no Iraqi official suspected of carrying it out has ever been brought to trial.

Treatment of women

A 1990 decree allows men to kill female relatives in the name of honour with no risk of punishment.

Uday Hussein's militia practices beheadings. Dozens of women accused of prostitution were beheaded in October 2000 with no judicial process. One was an obstetrician whose real crime was believed to be criticising corruption in the health service.

Nidal Shaikh Shallal, a government worker who fled Iraq, said women are also beheaded for lying, though they mostly belong to families opposed to the regime.

Dissident women are also raped, she said, and the wives of dissidents are either killed or tortured in front of their husbands to obtain confessions.

Prisons

In the Mahjar prison in central Baghdad, inmates are beaten twice a day and the women among them raped by the guards.

Two large petrol reservoirs are connected to the prison to destroy the Mahjar in an emergency.

The "casket prison" keeps inmates in rows of mortuary-style steel boxes until they confess to their crimes or die.

A UN team was prevented in 1998 from investigating claims that biological weapons had been tested on prisoners

Human Rights Watch have reported on the use of execution to "cleanse" prisons. In 1984, 4,000 political prisoners were killed in one jail.

Persecution of the Kurds

Documents captured by Kurds document the arrest and execution of 8,000 men and boys in 1983.

Amnesty International estimates over 100,000 Kurds were killed or "disappeared" during 1987-88.

A chemical weapons attack on the town of Halabja killed 5,000 civilians and injured 10,000 more.

As part of a policy of Arabisation, Kurds and other non-Arabs are expelled from oil-rich areas of the north to dilute their claims to the underground riches. Arabs from the south are encouraged to move north.

Persecution of the Shia community

Shias are the majority community in Iraq, making up 60% of the population, but any religious or tribal leader that becomes too prominent is killed before he or she is a threat to the regime.

More than 100 Shia clerics have disappeared since the 1991 uprising. The most senior among them, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, was murdered in 1999.

Entire Shia villages were destroyed in response to attacks on government buildings in southern Iraq.

Marshes in the south have also been drained to force Shia Marsh Arabs - a distinct indigenous group who have lived on the marshes for millennia - to move to cities where they could be more easily controlled by President Saddam's security apparatus.

Half the estimated 400,000 Marsh Arabs are now living in refugee camps in Iran. The remainder are internally displaced in Iraq.