DM Monitoring
LONDON: The situation in Syria is becoming “increasingly bleak” as human rights violations and conflict continue, U.N. war crimes investigators said, underlining that the time is not ripe for refugees to return to their country under these conditions.
The U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria said the overall situation was increasingly bleak, noting hostilities in several areas of the fractured country, its collapsing economy, drying riverbeds and increased attacks by Daesh militants.
“One decade in, the parties to the conflict continue to perpetrate war crimes and crimes against humanity and infringing the basic human rights of Syrians,” the chair of the commission, Paulo Pinheiro said, releasing its 24th report. “The war on Syrian civilians continues, and it is difficult for them to find security or safe haven in this war-torn country.”
Incidents of arbitrary and incommunicado detention by regime forces continue, the report said. “The Commission has continued to document not only torture and sexual violence in detention but also custodial deaths and enforced disappearances,” a press release said.
Amnesty International similarly released a report recently saying that Syrian refugees who returned home have been subjected to detention, disappearance and torture at the hands of the Syrian regime forces.
In a report entitled “You’re going to your death,” the rights group documented what it said were violations committed by Syrian intelligence officers against 66 returnees, including 13 children between mid-2017 and spring 2021. Among those were five cases in which detainees had died in custody after returning to the country torn by civil war, while the fate of 17 forcibly disappeared people remains unknown.
“Any government claiming Syria is now safe is willfully ignoring the horrific reality on the ground, leaving refugees once again fearing for their lives,” said Marie Forestier, a researcher on refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International. She said that while military hostilities may have subsided in most parts of Syria, the Syrian regime’s “propensity for egregious human rights violations has not.”
The Syrian regime and its chief international backer, Russia, have publicly called on refugees to return home and accused Western countries of discouraging it with claims that Syria is still unsafe.
