Iraq: Employment Rights for People with Disabilities

 Iraq is failing to implement its national laws ensuring employment rights for people with disabilities, leaving job quotas for Iraqis with disabilities unfilled and hundreds of thousands unemployed, Human Rights Watch said today.

Both federal Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have laws setting a minimum quota of 5 percent of public sector jobs for people with disabilities. A representative from the Iraqi Federal Public Service Council, the governmental body that regulates public employment, told Human Rights Watch that the public sector has not met the quota. Figures on public sector employment for people with disabilities provided to Human Rights Watch by a representative of the KRG show that the authorities there are also not meeting this quota in the public sector.