Top U.N. Rights Official Denounces Executions in Iraq as ‘Obscene’

By TIM ARANGO and NICK CUMMING-BRUCE, NYT

BAGHDAD — With increasing regularity, Iraq’s condemned prisoners are rounded from their cells in groups. One by one, they are led down a hallway to an execution chamber where they are hanged, the sound of the trapdoor reverberating through the cells. There is no advance notice, no last meal, no goodbyes.

There were 21 people hanged on Wednesday, 8 earlier this month and 12 more in mid-March. Iraq’s justice minister said that at least 9 more had been executed this year.

There are reports that the Justice Ministry plans to execute about 150 in coming days — eclipsing the 129 prisoners executed last year, which was nearly double the 68 people hanged in 2011.

“Executing prisoners in batches like this is obscene,” Navi Pillay, the United Nations human rights chief, said in a statement released in Geneva on Friday that was the harshest yet toward an Iraqi government that has drastically increased the number of executions since the withdrawal of American forces at the end of 2011.

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