A Baghdad courtroom on Sunday sentenced in absentia the exiled daughter of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to seven years in jail for “promoting” her father’s outlawed Baath celebration.

The celebration was dissolved and banned after Hussein was toppled in the course of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

According to the ruling, which AFP was in a position to evaluate, Raghad Saddam Hussein was discovered responsible of the crime of “promoting the activities of the banned Baath party”, throughout tv interviews she gave in 2021.

In Iraq as we speak, anybody displaying photographs or slogans selling the ousted regime may be topic to prosecution.

The ruling doesn’t point out the precise interviews over which she was convicted.

But in 2021, Hussein spoke on the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya channel about Iraq’s situations underneath her father’s iron-fisted rule from 1979 to 2003.

“Many people told me that our period was indeed a time of glory, of pride,” she informed the Saudi channel. “Of course, the country was stable and rich.”

Hussein lives in Jordan, alongside along with her sister Rana. Their brothers, Uday and Qusay, had been killed by the US military in Mosul in 2003.

For nearly all of Iraqis, the quarter century throughout which Saddam Hussein dominated remains to be seen as a time of brutal repression.