INTRODUCTION – PROMISING CONDITIONS AND UNFULFILLED PROMISE

In a book that contains so many laudable chapters detailing the rising importance of international law applied directly in domestic courts, Iraq stands as a stark anomaly. Following the departure of the US and UK administered Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty to a democratically elected government, Iraq's authorities seem to be at best equivocal and at worst somewhat hostile to the notion that Iraq's domestic courts should play a role in ensuring that Iraq abide by its international legal commitments, in particular as concerns the matters of human rights and criminal law that attract much scholarly attention.

This is rather surprising for two reasons. First of all, Iraq is not a nation that is wary of international commitments. This was very much the case historically, and even more so following the fall of the Saddam regime. Prior to 2003, Iraq was a signatory to most major human rights treaties, among them the Genocide Convention (acceded to in 1959), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (both ratified by Law 193 of 1970), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ratified 1970), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (ratified 1986), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (ratified 1994).

If anything, the commitment to international law as a formal matter has grown more robust. Even a cursory glance at Iraq's legislative achievements over the past legislative term, running from 2006 to 2010, demonstrates a decided commitment to enter into international obligations and treaties of various sorts rather than, as regrettably happens all too often in the United States, to avoid them on the grounds that they are some sort of pernicious ‘entanglement’. In 2008 and 2009 alone, for example, Iraq's Council of Representatives, which serves as its legislature, ratified or acceded to twenty-two separate international treaties or covenants, a number that I surmise would compare well with ratification rates in nearly any other nation over the same time period.