President of the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC), Nasr Al-Hariri, sent a legal memorandum to the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, about the Assad regime’s new zoning plans in the Yarmouk refugee and their serious threats to the property rights of residents of the district.
The memorandum included a brief overview on the location of the camp – home to the largest concentration of Palestinian-Syrians in Syria – the date of its establishment and its pre-war population. The memo also highlighted the violent aerial bombardment that the Assad regime’s and Russian forces carried out against the camp and the massive destruction they caused.
The memorandum also highlighted the new zoning plans that the Assad regime announced for a number of areas across Syria, including the Yarmouk camp. The memo made it clear that these plans are part of the new real estate policies that Assad regime adopted under Law No. 10 with the aim of changing the demographic landscape in Syria.
The memorandum made it clear that the new zoning plans are aimed at legitimizing the seizure of the properties of the displaced people and refugees following the large-scale looting of their homes by regime forces.
Al-Hariri called upon the parties concerned with the issue of Palestinian refugees, especially the Palestine Liberation Organization and UNRWA to assume their responsibilities with regard to preventing the implementation of these plans. He also called for explicitly denouncing these plans, forcing the Assad regime to reverse it decisions and laws in this regard, and ensuring a fallback to the zoning plans of 2004.
Al-Hariri called on the European Union, the major actors in Syria, and international humanitarian and human rights organizations to urgently intervene and exert real pressure on the Assad regime to give up its plans which will have disastrous consequences on the properties of residents of the Yarmouk camp.
Al-Hariri stressed that the Assad regime’s attempts to legitimize the seizure of the property of Palestinian refugees and Syrian citizens constitute a clear a crime against humanity. (Source: SOC’s Media Department)
