Baladi News – (Ahmad Abdul Haq)
On the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) released its yearly report entitled “Stopping the Torture Machine Should be on Top of every Negotiation Agenda,” which sheds light on the practice of torture inside detention centers and its subsequent effects that include death and distortions.
The report was limited to “the documented number” of victims only, which seems relatively modest in the midst of the Syrian tragedy and the volume of the hell that Assad built and surrounded with fences of silence and fear. Syrians are aware of the fact that the proportion of those who survive death at Assad’s detention centers is one half at most. Dozens of thousands of detainees are unaccounted for in Syria, especially that Assad’s regime has at least two crematoriums and two choppers of corpses, which indicates a shocking and disastrous final number of the victims of torture whose corpses were hidden, which a cannot be determined with accurately.
The report documents the death toll due to torture in Syria from March 2011 until June 2017. 13,029 individuals at least have died, including 164 children and 57 women. Of those, Syrian regime forces have killed 12,920 individuals, including 161 children and 41 women, while Self-Management Forces have killed 26 including one child and two women. ISIS has killed 30 individuals, including one child and 13 women, whereas Fateh al Sham Front killed 17 individuals. Armed opposition factions have killed 30 individuals, including one child and one woman
The report stresses that torture is still ongoing as a mechanical pattern in an extremely savage and sadistic manner, and exhibits a sectarian nature in many cases, especially in the Syrian regime’s detention centers given that the regime holds the greatest portion of detainees at a percentage of 87% of no less than 106,727 individuals who are still detained according to SNHR’s data since March 2011 (the real figures are much larger, as the regime does not declare the names of detainees and as many families do not confess or know that they have detained members).
The report emphasizes that the Syrian regime, via multiple apparatuses, have practiced torture as an institutional policy and a pattern in a widespread manner. This constitutes a blatant violation to the international human rights law and qualifies as crimes against humanity, and resulted, in many cases, in violating the right to life in a heavy manner. Moreover, the crimes that were perpetrated after the start of the non-international armed conflict in a systematic, widespread manner constitute a blatant violation to the international humanitarian law and qualify as war crimes.
The report calls on the Syrian regime to take immediate steps to cease all forms of torture, and suspend all capital punishment sentences as it is issued on the grounds of confessions that were extracted under brutal torture, and launch an immediate investigation into all the death cases inside the detention centers, and release arbitrarily arrested detainees, especially children and women, and immediately grant the Commission of Inquiry, the International Committee of the Red Cross and all objective human rights organizations an access to detention centers.
Furthermore, the report calls on the remaining parties to respect the international human rights law, immediately cease torture practices, and hold the people who are involved accountable.
The report calls on the Security Council and the United Nations to renew the demands for the Syrian regime to seriously cease torture practices, and immediately reveal the fates of victims of torture, and rescue the remaining detainees as soon as possible, and to punish all people who are involved in the machine of torture. Also, the report calls on Russia to cease its obstruction of referring the case in Syria to the International Criminal Court.