ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday released its annual report on the current state of human rights across the globe, criticizing Iraq's federal government for withholding the salaries of Kurdistan Region civil servants for much of 2025 and expressing concern regarding the state of the country's environmental situation, women's rights, and anti-LGBT violence.

The NGO's World Report 2026 asserted that Iraq is maintaining a state of "fragile stability," praising the success of the country's November parliamentary elections while asserting that "deteriorating government services, environmental degradation, continued repression and limitations on civic space, and the passage of draconian laws rolling back rights remained key areas of concern."

"Since 2014, Baghdad has intermittently withheld Erbil’s share of the federal budget, using payments as leverage to force concessions in negotiations over oil revenues," the report noted.

The payment of the Region's civil servant salaries and Baghdad's control of its oil exports were two major points of contention in 2025, with an agreement eventually being reached in September to resume exports after a 30-month halt.

The current terms of the agreement have the Kurdistan Region selling its oil through Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO), and handing over 120 billion dinars in domestic revenues to Baghdad on a monthly basis, in exchange for the disbursement of its civil servant salaries.

"Baghdad’s withholding public sector salaries has directly affected the quality and provision of public services in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), including health care and education," HRW continued.

The report notes that the failure to pay public-school employees has “threatened students’ right to education,” as frequent strikes by teachers and administrators have left classrooms empty.

A similar crisis has gripped the medical sector, where health workers have walked off the job in protest, often limiting public facilities to emergency care only. As financial pressures mount, many doctors have moved into private practice, a transition HRW says is “reducing capacity of public hospitals” and effectively “lowering the quality of care” for the region’s most vulnerable patients who cannot afford private treatment.

Electricity failures

In 2025, Iraq’s electricity sector faced “severe strain,” particularly during the summer months, jeopardizing Iraqis’ right to electricity, the NGO reported.

The Ministry of Electricity reported that dwindling gas supplies from Iran had caused “a loss of 3,800 megawatts from the power grid,” forcing several plants to either shutter or scale back production in July. The crisis peaked on August 11, when a record-breaking heatwave pushed temperatures “up to 52°C,” causing a spike in demand that overloaded the system and triggered blackouts across the central and southern provinces.

The government’s failure to provide electricity has forced citizens to rely on “heavily polluting and expensive diesel generators,” which, often located in densely populated areas, “threaten Iraqis’ right to a clean and healthy environment and their right to health.” The World Health Organization classifies diesel exhaust as a “Type 1 carcinogen.”

In stark contrast to the instability in much of Iraq, HRW hailed the successes of the Kurdistan Regional Government's Runaki Project, which seeks to provide round-the-clock electricty across the Region.

While central and southern governorates grappled with widespread blackouts, the Kurdistan Region saw significant progress, with HRW noting that “3.7 million people in the KRI, about half the population, received continuous electricity” as of September.

Environmental rights

Iraq remains “among the most vulnerable countries to global warming,” facing a convergence of “environmental crises, including droughts, desertification, and rising temperatures,” the report noted.

Despite these vulnerabilities, the country remains a major contributor to the climate crisis: as the world’s sixth-largest oil producer, it ranks third globally in gas flaring, a “wasteful process of burning methane gas during oil extraction” that accounts for “nearly 10 percent of the flaring emissions of greenhouse gases worldwide.”

This practice has taken a severe toll on local populations, as “communities living near gas flares increasingly report health harms,” such as “respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.”

The report noted the efforts of grassroots environmental groups but asserted that such activists “continue to be met with harassment, intimidation, and threats.”

Women's and LGBTQ+ rights

HRW asserted that women and girls in Iraq continue to face a legal system that “enables impunity for male violence,” with a penal code that allows for the “punishment” of wives and permits rapists to escape prosecution by marrying their victims.

Following a February 2025 amendment to Iraq’s Personal Status Code, religious authorities developed a new law allowing couples to choose between the 1959 civil law or the Shiite Ja’afari code to govern matters such as marriage, divorce, custody, and inheritance.

It allows the husband to convert the marriage contract to be governed by the law without the wife’s knowledge or consent, divorce his wife without informing or obtaining her approval, and automatically gives custody of children to the father after the age of seven, regardless of their interests.

One of the provisions of the original amendment would reduce the minimum marriage age for girls to nine years old. It was later dropped due to widespread public opposition.

"By effectively establishing separate legal regimes with different rights accorded to different sects, the amendment undermines the right to legal equality for all Iraqis found in article 14 of the constitution and international human rights law," HRW said.

Meanwhile, a long-awaited anti-domestic violence law remained “stalled for over a decade,” leaving survivors with “limited access to shelter or justice” while the few existing underground shelters faced “harassment, intimidation, and threats” from both families and authorities.

This broader erosion of rights extended to LGBTQ+ Iraqis. On April 27, 2024, parliament passed an amendment to the “Law on Combatting Prostitution,” imposing 10 to 15 years in prison for same‑sex relations and 1 to 3 years for those who undergo or perform gender-affirming medical care or for “imitating women.”

The amendment also mandates up to 7 years in prison and heavy fines for “promoting homosexuality,” a term left undefined. Media outlets complied with a 2023 directive requiring the substitution of “homosexuality” with “sexual deviance” and banning the word “gender.”

The watchdog noted that LGBT Iraqis continued to face digital targeting and violent attacks — including “killings, abductions, torture, and sexual violence ”— often at the hands of armed groups, while authorities relied on vague penal code provisions to criminalize identity and expression, allowing such abuses to persist with impunity.