ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Three contentious bills are on the agenda of the Iraqi parliament‘s Sunday meeting, and disagreement between the parties might lead to another exclusion of the bills from the session.
The parliament is set to vote on a bill that would return land confiscated under the Baath regime to the original Kurdish and Turkmen owners, the amendments to the controversial personal status law, and the general amnesty bill that would change the definition of affiliation with terror groups.
“All three bills have been put on the agenda. If they are passed, they will be together. This happens if the legal quorum is reached,” Dara Sekanyani, a member of the legal committee in the Iraqi parliament told Rudaw.
“If no agreement is reached, the session may not be held,”
The parliament has done a first and a second reading for all three bills, however, disputes among the parties have prevented voting on the contentious bills.
Yassin al-Ithawi, a Sunni MP said that the opinion of the Sunni parties was not taken regarding the amnesty bill, rendering the bill “incomplete”, adding that the legal committee has yet to vote on the bill.
“Up until today, the legal committee has not voted on the general amnesty law, so including it in today’s agenda is wrong,” Ithawi said.
The general amnesty bill aims to amend the definition of affiliation with terrorist organizations in the 2016 General Amnesty Law.
This amendment was a primary demand of Sunnis when they agreed to join the ruling State Administration Coalition with the Shiite Coordination Framework and Kurdish parties to form the government.
Sunnis argue that thousands from their community have been unjustly imprisoned in Shiite-dominated Iraq since 2003 due to alleged links to terrorist groups.
The bill was proposed by the parliament’s legal, security, defense, and human rights committees.
The parliament is also set to vote on the controversial proposed changes in personal status law, which has caused uproar within women and civil rights groups as they would effectively legalize child marriage.
If passed, the proposed amendment would allow Iraqis the choice to follow religious rules to govern matters in their marriage. For Shiites, the bill specifies following the provisions of the Jaafari school of jurisprudence, which permits marriage for girls as young as nine and boys at fifteen.
On Sunday, the legislature is also scheduled to vote on the land restitution bill. Voting on the Kirkuk land restitution bill was supposed to be held last month, however, it was excluded from the agenda for the September 4 session, prompting Kurdish parties to boycott the parliament meeting.
The bill has gone through its first and second readings but has not been put to a vote.
Multi-ethnic regions known as the disputed areas, particularly the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, have long been a point of contention between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the Iraqi government. In the 1970s, Kurdish and Turkmen lands were seized by the Baath regime under the pretext they were located in prohibited oil zones and the land was given to Arabs who were resettled into the area.
Following the fall of the Baath regime in 2003, Iraq began a policy of de-Arabization under Article 140 of the constitution, aiming to reverse the demographic changes imposed by former dictator Saddam Hussein.
In July 2023, the Council of Ministers unanimously approved a draft law revoking all Baath-era rulings that had confiscated agricultural lands from Kurds and Turkmen in Kirkuk. However, restoring the land to its original owners requires the passage of an additional law.
