French jihadists appeal to UN to avoid death penalty

Five French jihadists sentenced to death in Iraq have appealed to the UN to pressure France to bring them home, their lawyer has said, adding they were suffering inhumane treatment.

File picture dated April 29, 2010 shows an Iraqi soldier standing guard in front of prisoners waiting to be released from Al-Rusafa detention facility in Baghdad. SABAH ARAR / AFP FILES

The prisoners are suffering "inhumane and degrading treatment inside Iraq's prisons," lawyer Nabil Boudi told AFP Thursday.

The French government is “perfectly informed of the situation” but has done nothing to stop it,” he alleged, emphasising that the state had a duty to offer consular protection to “all French citizens, without exception.”

The five inmates are Brahim Nejara, Bilel Kabaoui, Leonard Lopez, Fodil Tahar Aouidate and Mourad Delhomme. They were among 11 jihadists sentenced to death last year in Iraq after being charged with belonging to the Islamic State armed group.

Boudi has appealed to the United Nations Committee against Torture, which monitors the implementation by member states of the UN Convention against Torture, to "take provisional protective measures (...) to avoid the complainants suffering irreparable harm."

He has also called on the UN to condemn France for refusing to repatriate the men and try them on French soil.

Public opinion against

In a letter sent to their families in January, published by French daily Liberation, two of the French convicts complained of "incessant threats, verbal and physical, from militias" working inside Baghdad's Rusafa prison.

"Some of us have been tortured and humiliated. The pressure is so great that some among us have closed themselves off and start talking to themselves and are better off dead," Brahim Nejara and Fodil Tahar Aouidate wrote.

A visiting French official had told them in December there was "nothing he could do", they added.

Last week, France's national consultative commission on human rights, which advises the government, recommended that they be brought back home.

But with public opinion in France, where over 250 people have been killed in jihadist attacks since 2015, firmly against allowing them to return home, President Emmanuel Macron's government is loathe to take them back.