The Faculty of Law’s Private Law Branch has hosted a scientific symposium titled “The Legal System for Foreigners Working in Iraq”

The Private Law Branch hosted a scientific seminar entitled (The Legal System for the Work of Foreigners in Iraq) under the auspices of the Dean, Prof. Dr. Saeed Ali Ghafel. The symposium was attended by Prof. Dr. Ahmed Hussein Jalab Al-Fatlawi. The researcher confirmed that the symposium was only an attempt to shed light on Iraq’s legal structure for foreign workers, there is a distinction between Arab foreigners’ work and non-Arab foreigners’ work.
It should be noted that Arab foreign workers have legal status that is similar to that of Iraqi workers in terms of rights and responsibilities, which is in direct contradiction to Iraq’s commitment to the International Labor Convention on Discrimination in Employment and Occupation No. 111 of 1958, and that the Arab worker is considered an Iraqi by Iraqi legislator in the instructions governing the employment of foreigners in Iraq,  exception of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the Iraqi lawmaker did not control the conditions and processes for firms and offices that hire foreign labor. The symposium proposed unifying the provisions relating to foreigners’ work in Iraq with independent legislation in line with the developments that occurred in our dear country after it adopted the path of an open economy and in accordance with the provisions of Iraqi private international law in order to achieve the goals of the research on the subject.
Meaning that the proposed legislation aims to protect Iraq’s national and international interests by taking into account the law governing foreigners’ work in Iraq, the international and regional agreements to which Iraq has committed, and the extent to which Iraq needs to attract foreign expertise and competencies and activate the principle of reciprocity, as well as the protection of employment on the other by requiring legal organizations that hire foreign employees to give a bank guarantee from a government bank for each worker hired, on the other hand, imposing a penalty of imprisonment and a fine in the case of a violation of provisions regulating the work of foreigners, provided that the period of imprisonment and the amount of the fine varies according to the severity of the violation, that the penalty multiplies according to the number of foreign workers for whom the violation occurred, and that the penalty is tightened to the highest possible level in the case of recurrence.