Paris, 11 March 2022 

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic issued its new report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. The report focused on the grave human rights violations committed throughout the country from July to December 2021.

The report focused on accountability and the litigation process in a number of European countries, against the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria. The committee described the ruling against a former Syrian intelligence officer as “HISTORIC” and mentioned the other similar cases, such as the case of the doctor in Germany, the former fighter in the Al-Nusra in the Netherlands, and the case filed in France against a former member of Jaysh al-Islam.

The report dealt with Syrian civilians being attacked with precision-guided weapons as well as indiscriminate and air strikes by Syrian government forces and the Russian air force.

The committee said that the Syrian government forces continue to conceal the fate of the detainees, and this sometimes makes the relatives and family members of the victims vulnerable to extortion. The report dealt with the indiscriminate bombing in northern Syria, the seizure of lands and the sanctions imposed on the regime. The report addressed the discrimination that Syrian women still suffer in general and the violations they are subjected to in many cases.

The Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression welcomes the report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry in Syria and stresses the importance of the role that the United Nations can play to stop the tragedy in Syria, especially in terms of implementing the recommendations mentioned in the commission’s report, in which it stressed the need to stop all indiscriminate and direct attacks on Civilians, in addition to the immediate cessation of torture, and the establishment of a special international mechanism to investigate and locate all detainees and/or the disappeared, and reveal their fates, in addition to emphasizing the need for the return of Syrian refugees to be voluntary and safe in which they are not exposed to physical harm or violation of their basic human rights.

The Center appreciates the work of the international mechanisms of the investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity that erupted across Syria and stresses that there is no way to stop these violations except through serious international action to launch war crimes and human rights violations before the International Criminal Court. If the response to impunity had taken such serious steps in the past, we would not have reached the situation today, where we see a recurrence of war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine.