Syrian activists on Wednesday held a sit-in outside the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland calling for the release of detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime.
Participants of the sit-in, who included members of the opposition’s High Negotiations Committee (HNC) and relatives of detainees, held placards stressing that they are making their demands on behalf of every Syrian family having their loved ones detained in Assad’s prisons.
Participants called for exercising pressure on the Assad regime to “immediately disclose all the names of detainees in its prisons; reveal their whereabouts and fate; and stop torture and ill-treatment of detainees.”
They also called for access for international humanitarian organizations to prisons and detention centers in Syria to introduce urgent medical and food supplies to detainees and for accesses to international human rights groups in order to check on the situation of detainees.
Participants stressed the importance of abolishing all special courts in Syria, particularly field courts, the court of terrorism, and court martials.
Rights groups have documented the detention of hundreds of thousands of civilians and dissidents by the Assad regime and presented compelling evidence of the death of thousands of detainees under torture in Assad’s prisons.
A forensic military photographer who defected from the Assad regime in 2015 leaked around 55,000 photos of the bodies of around 11,000 detainees bearing signs of systematic, severe torture and emaciation.
The US State Department on Tuesday said it had evidence the Assad regime has built a crematorium in the notorious Sednaya Prison to dispose of bodies of detainees, adding that about 50 bodies are burnt every day inside the facility. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
