GLOBAL APPEAL TO HELP AVERT ASSASSINATION OF IRAQI UNION LEADER

Early day motion 258, tabled 6 June 2005 by George Howarth (Labour). Signed by 49 members.

That this House supports the Labour Friends of Iraq global appeal, which has been supported by numerous rank and file trade unionists and others across the world, to publicise the severe threat to the life of Nozad Ismail, the President of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions in Kirkuk, who has twice escaped assassins and who receives regular death threats; believes that the self-styled resistance in Iraq is deliberately targeting the leadership of the Iraqi labour movement and, therefore, the prospects for a united, secular and democratic Iraq, as was exemplified when Hadi Saleh, the International Secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) was tortured and strangled before his house was ransacked for his comrades' contact details, when Ali Hassan Abd, of the IFTU's Oil and Gas Union, was gunned down in front of his children, and when Ahmed Adris Abbas of the Transport and Communication Workers Union was assassinated in Baghdad; and appeals for the widest possible support for this initiative not only from supporters of the British Labour movement but from anyone with an interest in nurturing Iraqi democracy.

Signatures by party: Labour 43, Conservative 2, Liberal Democrat 2, Plaid Cymru 1, UUP 1.