October 25, 2012
"(New York) – President Bashar al-Assad should release all peaceful activists, media professionals, and humanitarian assistance providers as part of an amnesty announced on October 23, 2012, Human Rights Watch, Alkarama, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, Index on Censorship, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Reporters Without Borders, and Samir Kassir Foundation – Skeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom said today. These persons have been detained purely for exercising their basic rights such as freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, or for assisting others and therefore should not have been detained or prosecuted in the first place, the groups said......
“If President Assad is serious about his amnesty, he
should open the doors of all his prisons to independent monitors to check who is
actually detained and why,” said Sarah Leah Whitson,
Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Otherwise, this amnesty will be yet
another false promise, with released detainees soon replaced by other activists,
humanitarians, and journalists locked up for peacefully doing their jobs.”
Some of the worst human rights abuses in Syria take place outside of public
view, behind the cell walls of detention facilities, where thousands of Syrians,
including many women and children, are arbitrarily detained and in many documented
cases, brutally tortured. Peaceful activists, human rights defenders, aid
workers, lawyers, doctors, writers, and journalists continue to be held, often
arbitrarily, in incommunicado detention, and subject to torture and
ill-treatment......"
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