The United States on Monday demanded the release of nearly 128,000 people who have been arbitrarily detained by the Assad regime.
“This practice is unacceptable,” US Ambassador Kelly Craft told the UN Security Council at its monthly meeting on the conflict in Syria. “The Assad regime must release detainees and provide international monitors access to detention centers,” she said.
Head of the Syrian Negotiations Commission, Nasr al-Hariri, told a press conference on Monday said that work is underway to activate the issue of detainees as he expressed the hope that a large number of detainees will be released in parallel with the launch of the work of the Constitutional Committee as a motivating factor to gain the confidence of the Syrian people.
Multiple rights groups said that the Assad regime’s security and intelligence services continue to detain people in most Syrian regions. In its latest report, the Syrian Network for Human Rights said that it had documented 3,618 arbitrary arrests at the hands of the Assad regime since the beginning of 2019. (Source: Syrian National Coalition’s Media Department)
