The Syrian Legal Commission sent a legal note to the UN Secretary-General, President of the UN Security Council, and members of the UN General Assembly regarding the Assad regime’s mass killings of detainees in its prisons.
The Commission said that the Assad regime murders detainees and then informs their relatives of their death by phone or by giving them death certificates without handing over the bodies.
The Commission also said that the Assad regime detained 90 people in Hama province before 2014, adding that those detainees died in detention. Their relatives were informed of their deaths by the civil registers in Hama which did not give further details as to the cause of deaths.
“The Assad regime, right in front of the entire world, and with support and direction from the Russian and Iranian regimes, has recently begun giving lists of names of detainees killed under torture by its security services in its detention centers to civil registers across Syria,” the memo said.
“The move is aimed closing the file of the detainees, obliterating the crime of killing the detainees, and covering up the crime of genocide against tens of thousands of detainees. When registering the deaths, the civil registers in the Assad regime-controlled areas attribute the deaths to ill-health.”
Several Assad regime’s hospitals and medical centers, such as the Syrian Arab Red Crescent Hospital, Al-Mujtahid Hospital, Harasta Hospital, Hospital 601, and Tishreen Military Hospital in Damascus are involved in covering up the mass killing of detainees, the memo added.
The Commission called upon the international community, based on international law and the Geneva principles, to hold the Assad regime and its security apparatuses legal, criminal and civil responsibility for the crimes of torture, prevention of freedom, kidnapping and murder.
The Commission underscored the need to activate the work of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria to investigate these crimes, collect evidence and hear testimonies. It also stressed the need for revealing the fate of detainees, missing persons and those forcibly disappeared and those who have been liquidated in Assad’s security branches and prisons. It also called for bringing perpetrators of these crimes, chief among them is Bashar al-Assad, to justice.
The Commission called upon the international community to force the Assad regime to disclose the fate of detainees and the forcibly disappeared, hand over the bodies of those who died under torture, and revoke all false documents aimed at obliterating the deliberate killing of detainees and evading possible consequences and penalties.
The Syrian Legal Commission comprises a group of Syrian legal experts who are seeking to follow up on the Syrian file in general and the legal issues in particular. The Commission also aims to mobilize its legal expertise in the service of the Syrian people. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
