The Iraqi Supreme Court has rejected the transfer of Kurdish Education teachers and employees of Kirkuk from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to the Federal Ministry of Education.
The court heard the case in Baghdad on Tuesday, October 15, in the presence of plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit against the prime ministers of Iraq and the KRG and the speaker of the Iraqi parliament.
"This is not within our expertise," the court verdict stated.
On September 2, the plaintiffs, nine teachers and employees of Kirkuk Kurdish education, requested that their services be transferred to the General Directorate of Kurdish Education of the Iraqi Ministry of Education.
"We blame the three presidencies (Council of ministers of Iraq, KRG and Iraqi Parliament) for the delay in paying salaries and preventing the transfer of our services to the Iraqi government, so our complaints were against them," Mohammed Jalil, one of the complainants, told KirkukNow.
We blame these three presidencies for the delay in salaries and preventing the transfer of our services to the Iraqi government
"We had several legal evidence to transfer our services, but unfortunately our request was rejected today," he added.
There are 6,500 Kurdish teachers in Kirkuk Kurdish education departmentand about 1,500 employees who work for the Kurdistan Regional Government's Ministry of Education, but teach in Kirkuk. Their biggest problem is that they are not paid their salaries on time.
The KRG failed to pay them on time and at least 14 salaries have not been paid across the past 10 years, which, according to Jalil, was the reason for filing the complaint in the Federal Court.
According to the statistics of the KRG Ministry of Education, there are 14,000 teachers and employees on the staff of the ministry, whom serve in the schools of the disputed territories: governorates of Kirkuk, Nineveh, Diyala and Salah al-Din.
Kurdish education unit in Kirkuk paid by the KRG are 7,751 teachers and employees teaching Kurdish curriculum to 100,000 pupils in 500 schools. The main language for education in Iraq is Arabic while in the three provinces of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region IKR it’s Kurdish.
The KRG has opened special directorates for Kurdish education in the disputed territories of Kirkuk, Nineveh and Diyala which alike its Kurdish counterparts suffer lack of budget for accurate monthly payroll and shortage of staff, curriculums and utilities.
The oil rich city of Kirkuk, Iraq's second largest oil reserves, is ethnically a mixed province for 1.7 million Kurds, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and Turkmen. It has long been at the center of disputes between Baghdad and the Erbil.
The ministerial curriculum of the current Iraqi government headed by Muhammad Shia’a al-Sudani includes (paragraph 21- page 25) on “linking all Kurdish study schools that are located outside the Kurdistan Region to the General Directorate of Kurdish Studies in the Federal Ministry of Education and transferring its staff to this department.”
