The Dutch NRC newspaper, in cooperation with the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison, said that a Dutch national died under torture in the prisons of the Assad regime.
The Association obtained information about the young man who died in the regime’s prisons in mid-2018 about a year before the investigation was published on March 18, according to the Association’s founder, Diab Sarriya.
The Netherlands intends to file a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice in light of the emergence of evidence proving the arrest of the young man and subjecting him to torture in Assad’s prisons. His family and lawyer are exerting to pressure on the Dutch government in this regard.
According to Sarriya, this is the first time that a country files a lawsuit against another country for the death of a citizen inside the prisons of the other country.
He added that the witnesses, the general context of the detainees’ cases and the investigation that the local newspaper Enab Baladi published are the evidence that can be presented before the court. He pointed out that there are dozens of reports condemning the regime and documenting what is happening inside its prisons.
Meanwhile, member of the Syrian Opposition Coalition’s (SOC) political committee, Salwa Aksoy, said that the Dutch young man is not the first foreign national to be killed under torture in the Assad regime’s prisons as murder is one of the regime’s tools to get rid of any evidence that may be used against it.
Aksoy stressed that there is compelling evidence on Assad’s crimes, especially the crimes of murder in detention, but the international community organizations have so far failed to assume their role and refuse to hold the criminal regime accountable.
Aksoy said that Assad’s survival in power means that it will continue to kill detainees under torture in its prisons. She called on the United Nations and its institutions to ratchet up pressure on the Assad regime and its backers to give the International Committee of the Red Cross and neutral observers access to its prisons and seek to release the detainees.
(Source: SOC’s Media Department)
