Sad, tired eyes peer out from behind the bars of Kadhimiya Prison. The pleas are desperate: "I swear I am innocent." "The criminal investigators raped us." "I have been here eight months and I have not seen a judge."
Nearly 200 women, some with their toddlers and infants living with them in their cells, are imprisoned in Baghdad's only detention facility for women. Suspected killers bunk with women charged with petty crimes. Some don't know why they were arrested.
"We consider all of them innocent -- innocent until proven guilty," said Abdul Qadir, legal advisor to Iraqi Vice President Tariq Hashimi. "They have constitutional rights that should uphold their treatment."
But in a country mired in corruption, the protection of constitutional rights is elusive. Some women report that their lawyers have been shot and killed en route to the prison. Others say judges have been bribed.
A Times review of nearly three hours of video -- shot inside the prison and provided by Hashimi, who is leading a call for protecting prisoners' rights and establishing a credible justice system -- suggests the problems are deep-rooted and systemic.
The ministries of Justice, Information and Human Rights denied repeated requests by a reporter to visit the prison.
"It will cause contradiction and controversy," said Busho Ibrahim, deputy minister of Justice, who oversees prisons. "People will start questioning the human rights and whether they're guilty or not. . . . I can guarantee you there are no human rights violations. We had four or five accusations, but after investigating they turned out not to be true."
But tales of injustice and inhumane treatment are plentiful in letters from female inmates, and evidence gathered by members of parliament and human rights activists indicates that the problems begin from the moment a woman is detained.
"This is not acceptable in any war in any time," inmate Suad Aziz Abbas, a former elementary school principal with 30 years of government service, says in one of the videos.
She and her daughter, a college student and newlywed, were charged with murder, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Their arrests came as Abbas was searching for her only son, an oil engineer, who went missing in 2004. She had sought help from the Human Rights Ministry and elsewhere, she said, to no avail.
'Sit down and shut up'
