Zakia Hakki’s career connected the judiciary, Kurdish politics, exile and parliamentary advocacy. Her documented roles clarify her contribution to Iraq’s 2005 constitutional debate.

An Iraqi woman in a black head covering and pale patterned scarf holds a ballot above a translucent ballot box beside election staff at a polling station
A woman voting in Rawah on 15 December 2005, photographed by Lance Cpl. Shane S. Keller, US Marine Corps. This is context for women’s participation in Iraq’s political transition; the voter is not identified as Hakki. Public domain. [7] Photo: Lance Cpl. Shane S. Keller / US Marine Corps, 15 December 2005, public domain.

The 1959 judicial appointment

Zakia Ismail Hakki was an Iraqi Kurdish lawyer, judge and later parliamentarian. The Iraq Foundation’s report on women in the Council of Representatives identifies her appointment in 1959 as Iraq’s first female judge, alongside the same year’s appointment of Naziha al-Dulaimi as a cabinet minister. [1] These were different offices held by different women. Hakki’s subsequent career crossed legal practice, Kurdish political organization and debates about the institutions that would follow Baʿathist rule.

Law, discrimination and exile

In a July 2003 interview reported by The Christian Science Monitor, Hakki recalled graduating from law school in 1957 among five women in a class of 350 men. She described overlapping discrimination as a woman, Kurd and Shiʿa Muslim, and discussed her Kurdish political involvement and work in family and civil law. The report records departure for the United States in 1996 and her later return to work on Iraq’s legal reconstruction. [2] These recollections give her experience a more concrete setting than a generalized account of effortless professional progress.

Which institution did she serve?

The same 2003 report identifies Hakki as a Justice Ministry adviser from the Iraqi Reconstruction Development Council, an Iraqi-American panel. [2] The Wilson Center’s 2005 conference record identifies her separately as a member of the Interim National Assembly and senior Justice adviser. Its institutional overview lists the women of the 2003 Iraqi Governing Council: Songul Chapook, Rajaa Habib Khuzai and Aqila al-Hashimi, later replaced by Salma al-Khufaji. [3] Hakki’s advisory and assembly roles should therefore not be merged into a claim that she belonged to that earlier council.

Women’s representation in the constitution debate

Anne Penketh’s August 2005 interview records Hakki welcoming the draft’s aim of at least twenty-five per cent women in the National Assembly. Hakki credited cooperation among women’s groups across ethnic backgrounds and said they had opposed limiting the provision to two parliamentary terms. [4] The interview captures her position during the drafting negotiations. At Wilson Center meetings, she also emphasized civil-society participation and the practical protection of rights beyond the text of decrees. [3]

Later advocacy and remembrance

In an August 2014 contribution published under her own name, Hakki drew attention to women facing ISIS violence, the stigma experienced by survivors and the need for international protection. The publication identifies her parliamentary service as 2005–10. [5] Kurdistan 24 reported her death in the United States in August 2021 and recalled her judicial and political work. [6] Her legacy can be followed through specific appointments, first-person testimony and policy arguments, while recognizing that her positions were those of one participant in a wider and diverse women’s movement.

Sources and further reading

  1. Iraq Foundation, Women in the Council of Representatives: Lessons Learned and Case Studies Report, historical overview, p. 4; project covering 2010–13.
  2. The Christian Science Monitor, Five women confront a new Iraq, 16 July 2003, section The judge who returned from the US; interview and contemporaneous account of Hakki’s work.
  3. Woodrow Wilson Center, Building a New Iraq: Ensuring Women’s Rights (2005), pp. 6, 23, 27–28 and 35–36; institutional overview, meeting record and participant biography.
  4. Anne Penketh, Judge hails guarantee of women MPs, The Independent, 23 August 2005; interview with Hakki on the constitutional draft.
  5. Zakia Hakki, contribution to Barbarians: ISIS’s Mortal Threat to Women, Wilson Center Viewpoints 60 (August 2014), p. 5; author’s advocacy and contributor identification.
  6. Kurdistan 24, Prominent Kurdish figure and Iraq’s first female judge dies at 82, 23 August 2021; contemporaneous death report.
  7. Lance Cpl. Shane S. Keller, Iraqi woman voting, Rawah, 15 December 2005, US Marine Corps photograph 051215-M-7772K-038, public domain, Wikimedia Commons.