His arrest took place in the context of a wider campaign of arrests of Al Hashimi's relatives and members of staff, soon after the Iraqi Security Forces raided the house of Tariq Al Hashimi under the orders of former Prime Minister Al Maliki in December 2011. A leading member of the secular Al Iraqiya coalition, Al Hashimi is seen as a critical voice against Al Maliki's attempts to centralise power. Not finding him at home during the raid, the Security Forces then turned to his relatives and his staff members, who were subsequently arbitrarily detained and sentenced to death.

On 21 December 2011, Al Batawi was arrested by the Iraqi Security Forces from his home in the Al-Mada'in District in Baghdad. Charged with terrorism on the basis of the Iraqi Anti-Terrorism Law No.13 of 2005, Al Batawi was then transferred to Baladiyat prison in Baghdad – a detention centre which falls under the control of the Ministry of Justice and where other members of Al Hashimi's staff were detained incommunicado – where he died under torture on 15 March 2012. Five days later, when shown his body at the Forensic Laboratory of Baghdad, Al Batawi's lawyer saw the victim had lost an enormous amount of weight and that he bore obvious signs of torture on his body, such as wounds on sensitive parts of his body, burn marks, and a cut-off tongue.

On 25 March 2012, a committee was established to investigate the circumstances of Al Batawi's death, following a request by the Ministry of Human Rights. The Committee found that Al Batawi's state of health had started deteriorating since December 2012 because of several diseases – bronchitis, colon irritation, headache, tonsillitis, inflammation of the intestines, stomach ulceration and bleeding of the higher oesophageal – for which it said Al-Batawi had received the required medical treatments. No mention was made of his loss of weight or even the clear signs of torture that the victim had been subjected to. To the contrary, the Committee concluded that Al-Batawi "died from a renal deficiency" according to a report from the forensic doctor of the Medical City Hospital, where Al Batawi had been transferred on 14 March 2012 to undergo kidney dialysis.

Contesting the Committee's findings, on 29 May 2014 Al Batawi's lawyer submitted a request to open an investigation into his death to the Al Karkh Criminal Court in Baghdad, who rejected the request under the pretext that the circumstances of Al Batawi's death had already been established.

Left without any recourse in view of at the local or national level, Al Batawi's lawyer transmitted the case to Alkarama to call upon the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions (SR SUMX) to urge the Iraqi authorities to conduct a prompt, independent and impartial investigation to shed light into the real causes of Al-Batawi's death.

"We are extremely concerned over the fact that the Ministry of Human Rights accepted the results of an inquiry that completely disregarded the elements raised by Al Batawi's lawyer," commented Inès Osman, Regional Legal Officer for the Mashreq at Alkarama.

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