Thursday, February 01, 2007

Another targetted group in Iraq--homosexuals

TomPaine.com - Gay + Iraqi = Dead: "For the very first time, an official United Nations human rights report released last week has confirmed the “violent campaigns” against Iraqi gays and the “assassinations of homosexuals in Iraq.”

“Attacks on homosexuals and intolerance of homosexual practices have long existed, yet they have escalated in the past year,” says the latest bi-monthly Human Rights Report of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), released on January 16. “Islamic groups and militias have been known to be particularly hostile towards homosexuals, frequently and openly engaging in violent campaigns against them. There have been a number of assassinations of homosexuals in Iraq,” the report says.

Including a section entitled “Sexual Orientation” for the first time, the 30-page report goes on to say that the UNAMI Human Rights Office “was also alerted to the existence of religious courts, supervised by clerics, where alleged homosexuals would be ‘tried,’ ‘sentenced’ to death, and then executed.”"

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