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EUJUST Lex mission in Iraq extended until end of 2013

Training for prison officials in Erbil (credit: Eujust Lex)

(BRUSSELS2) The European Rule of Law Mission in Iraq (EUJUST Lex) will continue its activities in the country until December 2013. The decision was approved yesterday (Wednesday 13 June) by the 27 ambassadors of the EU meeting in Coreper.

Presence in Iraq

After being located "off shore" for a long time, for security reasons - training was provided either in other countries in the region or in Europe - the Europeans are now present not only in Baghdad but also have branches in Basra and has? Erbil (Kurdistan). And the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, confirmed to the European Union that the EUjust Lex mission was "welcome" and asked for its "support" to support the Iraqi criminal justice system.

Diplomatic status

The conclusion of a SOMA – a Status of Mission Agreement – ​​is no longer required in the new format of European diplomatic service and PeSDC missions and has been discontinued. The European experts deployed in Iraq thus benefit from "diplomatic protection", in the same way as the diplomats, present at the EU Delegation, and are included on the latter's list, an expert on the matter told B2. . This arrangement thus avoids the passage before the Iraqi parliament for the approval of SOMA, which seemed to pose a problem.

Objective: training and exchange of experience

European action is essentially centered on training. A course has just taken place, at the beginning of June in Baghdad, for prison officials (governors, deputy governors and senior administrators) on the management of serious incidents: implementation of an emergency plan, incident management, respect for the rights of men, treatment of women... Another training course took place in Erbil on high-risk prisoners and sentence management, with the contribution of a Dutch expert. The participants (all executives of this prison in the Kurdish region) were sensitized to criminogenic factors (characteristics of offenders linked to criminal behavior), to the assessment of needs and risks, to the categorization of offenders, ...

As one of the mission managers explained to B2, " people may be inclined to wonder what the European Union is doing 'with a so-called 'rule of law' mission or quip saying 'what could be more boring than slowly trying to educate and train judges Iraqis, police officers and prison directors"...that would, in fact, be missing the point. In what is still a country ravaged by conflict, the experts we send with their experience enable their Iraqi counterparts to take the reins of their destiny into their own hands, and thus gradually raise the standards of Iraqi justice to a level respecting internationally recognized standards. »

Overall, 500 courses, 5000 trained staff

Launched in July 2005, EUJUST LEX-Iraq is headed by Hungarian Brigadier-General László Huszar - who was director general of the Hungarian prison administration - and Jonas Westerlund, his deputy, a Swedish diplomat. It comprises 53 people, divided into three functional teams: a "judicial" team, led by a Bulgarian prosecutor (Anton Girginov); a "police" team, led by a British policeman; and a "prisons" team, led by a British prisons officer, together with the command and a support element. Despite all the initial difficulties, including "difficult" security conditions, the Europeans have over the past seven years trained 5069 participants from the Iraqi Criminal Service (ICS), the judiciary and the police in almost 500 courses (492 courses exactly).

Nicolas Gros Verheyde

Chief editor of the B2 site. Graduated in European law from the University of Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne and listener to the 65th session of the IHEDN (Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Défense Nationale. Journalist since 1989, founded B2 - Bruxelles2 in 2008. EU/NATO correspondent in Brussels for Sud-Ouest (previously West-France and France-Soir).

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