The college of law at the University of Baghdad discussed a doctoral dissertation in the criminal law of a student (Sarmad Adnan Abboud), labeled (criminalizing institutional discrimination), on Sunday, 6/10/2024 on the conference hall at the college.
The dissertation aimed to draw attention to the existence of discriminatory practices in state institutions that require legal fairness, determine the scope of criminalization, indicate the adequacy of punishment for crimes of institutional discrimination within the Iraqi criminal law, review the experience of comparative criminal law, assess the comprehensive impact of criminalization and punishment in reducing discriminatory acts within public state institutions and the impact of that criminalization at the cultural and social level, measure the effectiveness of that impact within the determinants of the functions of contemporary criminal law and the role of those functions in promoting equality between individuals before the law and providing criminal protection of individuals ‘ rights and fundamental freedoms.
The dissertation included three chapters, the first of which dealt with the determinants of criminalizing institutional discrimination, the second chapter dealt with the ethical foundations of criminalizing institutional discrimination, and the third chapter dealt with the criminal protections in crimes of institutional discrimination.
The dissertation came up with several recommendations, the most important of which suggests that the Iraqi criminal legislator should have legal precedence in adopting the term “institutional discrimination” to create a special term that is generalized as a legal term to all discriminatory physical activities that affect individuals and groups in official and semi-official state institutions after the concept was limited to general discriminatory practices historically entrenched in social institutions, the abolition of the women’s quota system, as restricting members of the people in their choices by accepting the quota system for women without criteria of competence and experience and without any objective grounds for the choices of voters, and without providing electoral competition is a system that lacks equality between Gender and far from the principles of democracy.
