She Spent 16 Years in Iraqi Prisons… A Human Rights Appeal To Save 11 Yemenis, Including Hasna Ali
Yemen Monitor/ Newsroom:
The American Center for Justice (ACJ) has issued an urgent appeal to the Head of the Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council, Rashad al-Alimi, to intervene and end the suffering of 11 Yemeni citizens detained in Iraqi prisons for years.
In a statement, the Center said that among the detainees is Hasna Ali, who is spending her 16th year in prison, serving a sentence of up to 32 years amid deteriorating health conditions. It explained that Hasna suffers from serious health problems, including a perforated diaphragm and a gastric ulcer, in addition to being deprived of seeing her children throughout her detention.
The Center noted that the majority of Yemeni prisoners in Iraq face harsh sentences which it claims were issued in political contexts without proof of involvement in criminal or terrorist acts, emphasizing that this requires urgent government intervention to return them to the country.
It added that an opportunity exists to repatriate the Yemeni prisoners, given that the Iraqi government has concluded similar agreements with other countries. It called on the Presidential Leadership Council to make a sovereign decision to end the detainees’ suffering by accelerating the necessary technical procedures.
For his part, the Executive Director of the Center, lawyer Abdulrahman Barman, stated that addressing this file requires bypassing traditional procedures that failed to achieve results in the past and treating the case as an urgent human rights priority. Barman stressed that the health status of some detainees has reached critical levels requiring immediate intervention, while also praising the efforts of the Yemeni embassy in following up on the file.
Hasna Ali is considered one of the longest-held Yemeni prisoners in Iraq; she was arrested in 2010 and sentenced to prison due to her connection to her husband, the Al-Qaeda leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who was killed that same year after participating in the leadership of the organization in Iraq.
