Falsifying records to cover up torture
Fadel Abdul Ghany, director of SNHR, said the judicial and administrative complications described by families reflect a crisis that has accumulated over many years and is tied to the nature of detention and enforced disappearance cases.
“Requirements such as witnesses or certificates of good conduct are disconnected from reality. The detainee died in an unknown place under unknown circumstances, and asking the family of a victim of enforced disappearance to provide two witnesses to the death effectively means forcing them to prove what the state itself committed,” Abdul Ghany told The New Arab.
He said that much of the problem stemmed from the Assad regime previously issuing falsified death certificates designed to hide the fact that detainees died under torture.
“The Assad regime used falsified death certificates as a tool to erase the truth. In some cases, certificates listed fabricated causes of death. The Syrian Network for Human Rights documented hundreds of these fake certificates claiming natural causes, while evidence proved the victims died under torture,” he said.
“This means the system was not dysfunctional—it was actively engaged in falsifying the truth and concealing evidence of crimes committed against thousands of detainees.”
Abdul Ghany said the current government should urgently issue an exceptional regulation for victims of torture, execution and forced disappearance in regime prisons that exempts families from witness requirements, certificates of good conduct, and similar demands.
He said that new procedures should instead rely on databases from human rights groups, rulings issued by religious courts in areas which were outside regime control during the Syrian conflict, and confiscated archives from Syrian regime security forces.
He also stressed that the true cause of death should be stated in official documents because recording deaths under torture as “natural deaths” violates the right to truth and conceals criminal evidence necessary for accountability.
