A main obstacle during this pandemic was the concern for the safety of staff working
in the field, as many of them have been infected and one case of death has been
reported. The challenges included a lack of safety equipments along with the absence
of any policies that serve to protect health workers. In order to overcome these
challenges, safety equipments were provided and the staff have been efficiently
trained on using them.
The pandemic has resulted in the withdrawal of some of the Commission’s powers,
including the field visits to prisons; hindering the process of dealing with detainees’
files, who were amongst the most affected categories.
Additionally, among the most vulnerable groups are, people living in slums, people
with chronic diseases and cancer patients, members of the general security forces
and security personnel, front-line healthcare workers, displaced persons, and the
minorities. Due to the complicated situation, co-operation has been halted, but the
Commission has tried to work to around it and make it work by monitoring the
situation there from the perspective of “right to health” and referring that to the
authority; however, there was no any real response from them. Institutions need to
co-operate with their counterparts including regional institutions and networks to
pursue an approach to create a crisis response plan.
The Commission stated that the major challenge in Iraq is the difficulty of monitoring
the concerned executive bodies responsible for the realization of the right to health
and implementation of recommendations of international and national bodies. To
further emphasize the challenges, in a meeting with the Minister of Health,
recommendations were raised to the government and issued three official reports
regarding following-up the implementation of the preventive measures during the
pandemic; unfortunately, they have not been implemented yet, however the
Commission will continue to follow-up on these reports.
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