The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for tens of thousands of detainees to be released from regime prisons in Syria.
“Today in a sense the entire country has become a torture-chamber; a place of savage horror and absolute injustice,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein told a UN Human Rights Council forum in Geneva. “Ensuring accountability, establishing the truth and providing reparations must happen if the Syrian people are ever to find reconciliation and peace.”
Hussein’s testimony came a day after a UN report setting out regime “war crimes”, including chemical attacks and the deliberate bombing of civilians, medical services and staff, and infrastructure.
Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the UN Commission of Inquiry, referred to its finding that the scale of deaths in prisons indicated that the regime was responsible for “extermination as a crime against humanity”: “Too many voices have been silenced by enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention, or death.”
Witness testimony and photographs, including those brought out of Syria by a military photographer in 2013, have established the abuse and deaths of thousands of detainees.
The regime did not attend Tuesday’s forum, while the Russian envoy called the event a “waste of valuable time”.
Former detainees also testified about their experiences and those of others. Noura Al-Ameer al-Jizawi said, “Many….women are detained with their children, detained in places not even fit for animals, let alone fit for children,” she told the council.
Fadel Abdul Ghani, executive director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, explained that the regime holds 87% — 92,000 of the total of 106,000 — in detention.
