Syria (the Syrian Arab Republic)

Syria is the Middle East country where the regime censorship is strongest enforced and because of that the access to the local information is hardly accessible to NGOs (non-governmental organization) or other external organizations, which, as a result of that, release very restricted reports.

The supporters of the so called “Damascus spring”, a period of relative liberty for the opposition, that was encouraged by the democratization promises of the neo inaugurated Bashar Al-Assad on July, 2000, soon were needed to change idea. The regime kept arresting arbitrarily journalists critical towards Syrian politics and also human right activists. They were accused of undermining the state security and therefore were taken before the military court according to the laws of the emergency state in force as of 1963.

The authorized information sources consist in three official newspapers Al-Ba'ath, Teshreen and Al-Thawra and in the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), which is the only official channel of worldwide news and in some controlled TV channels, among which a satellite one. The ADSL internet connection has been introduced in 2003, but only governmental offices or companies (public and private) can use it. The government controls the opposition web sites in Arabic, as well as the ones that deal with the Kurdish minority. The last measure taken by Assad regime goes back to November, when the Syrians access to the famous web site “Facebook” was banned, joining thus a list of other prohibited communications web sites such as “YouTube”. There are numerous cases of arrested internet users, among which we can remember the Abdel Rahman al-Shaghouri case, who was arrested in 2003 for consulting a considered “subversive” web site (www.thisissyria.net) and therefore condemned to two and a half years in jail. In his case and in others, the international NGOs point the figure against the lack of legal representation, the denial of family visit, the inhuman treatments and tortures.

The freedom of association is regulated by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, where any organization needs to be registered and then to be controlled of their initiatives and meetings by the ministry officials whenever they required. The Syrian authorities often refuse to register the human rights groups. The Syrian journalist Nizar Nayouf was a member of one of these banned associations, the CDF (Committees for the Defense of Democracy Freedoms and Human Rights in Syria); he was sentenced to 10 years of prison in 1992 and released in terrible health conditions in 2001 on the eve of the Pope's visit in Damascus and due to international pressures. He lives today in exile in France. Nayouf is famous for declaring in a letter on January 5, 2004 to the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, that chemical and biological weapons were transferred from Iraq to Syria on the outbreak of the war. He has confirmed his theory with maps and information allegedly handed to him by an intelligence Syrian source, which show three sites where the weapons of Iraqi mass destruction have been hidden.

Among the dissidents convicted of crime simply expressing their opinion there are Michel Kilo and Anwar al-Bunni, the first is a writer and the second is a lawyer, prominent democratic activists that were sentenced this year to 3 and 5 years respectively in prison for signing in 2006 the “Beirut-Damascus Declaration”, which petition to normalize Syrian and Lebanese relations. Anwar al-Bunni was in past the legal representative of many Syrian dissidents, among them Maamoun Homsy, a Syrian MP who was arrested in 2001 and, after 5 years in jail, is now exiled in Lebanon. Farid Ghadry, another major dissident, established in 2001 the “Reform Party of Syria”, an opposition party banned in Syria and based in the US. Recently, following Ghadry's visit in Israel, his Syrian citizenship was revoked by Syrian authorities. At the end of August, Ghadry's posters were plastered in three of Syria's major cities, Halab, Idlib and Damascus, in an extremely brave defiant act by Syrian civil society.

The death penalty (not applied to minors) is imposed for diverse crimes. The penal code, that refers also to the Shari'a, as established by art.3 of the constitution, allows the judge to suspend the punishment for the rapist if he marries his own victim. Besides of that, it provides a mild attitude in judging the “honors crimes”. The last news of death penalty goes back to last October 25th, when five Syrians were sentenced before the military court for murder and theft and were hanged at Aleppo square in a public execution.

The Syrian regime also takes a firm line against the Kurds, which are a 10% of the population. It's banned for the Kurds to express their own identity, by breaking up peaceful demonstrations with hitting and arresting the participants, as happened for example on March 2006, during the celebration of the Nowruz, the Kurdish New Year's Day. Furthermore, about 300,000 Kurds are stateless following a regime decision of 1962, depriving Syrian citizenship to 100,000 Kurds.