Amnesty International has launched a petition calling on Russia and the United States to use their global influence to ensure that independent monitors are allowed in to investigate conditions in Syria’s torture prisons.
The petition, which was launched on Tuesday, came after Amnesty on Monday published a report, “Human Slaughterhouse” about Saydnaya Prison near Damascus where it said the Assad regime had executed as many as 13,000 detainees between 2011 and 2015.
Amnesty said that the petition will be presented to the US and Russian governments.
“The murder, torture, enforced disappearances and extermination carried out at Saydnaya since 2011 have been perpetrated by the Syrian authorities as part of a systematic attack against the civilian population,” Amnesty said.
“The violations at Saydnaya amount to crimes against humanity and must be investigated,” Amnesty said, adding that the Assad regime “must let in independent monitors to investigate Syria’s brutal detention centers, now.”
The rights group pointed out that detainees are still being transferred to Saydnaya to this day, and “trials” at the Military Field Court in Qaboun district of Damascus continue. There is therefore no reason to believe that executions have stopped, Amnesty added.
The Syrian Coalition expressed support for the set of recommendations put forward by Amnesty’s report, particularly with regards to calling on the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) to force the Assad regime to immediately cease extrajudicial executions against detainees; allow access for independent monitors to all places of detention; and to immediately and unconditionally release all those arbitrarily detained.
In a statement released on Tuesday, the Coalition urged the UN Security Council to initiate judicial proceedings based on the mechanism adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 21, 2016 which called for an investigation of war crimes in Syria and the prosecution of those responsible for the most serious crimes since 2011. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Office)
