Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday urged Syria to abolish its repressive security court, a ”kangaroo court” whose verdicts against those seen challenging the government cannot be appealed.
A report by the United States-based rights watchdog asked the European Union and the US to press Syria to scrap the court as a condition for improving ties with Damascus.
”The State Security Court is one of Syria’s main pillars of repression, a kangaroo court providing judicial cover for the persecution of activists, and even ordinary citizens, by Syria’s security agencies,” said HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson.
The report said the court has relied on ”sham trials to prosecute 153 defendants since January 2007 on the basis of vague charges”.
Among them were bloggers, Kurdish activists and eight people ”accused of insulting the Syrian president in private conversations”, it said.
One 67-year-old man was sentenced in 2007 to three years in jail ”because the security services overheard him insulting the Syrian president and criticising corruption” at a Damascus café, it said.
Another was prosecuted ”after informants said he had insulted President Bashar al-Assad while watching television at his uncle’s home”, it said.
”As a measure of how repressive Syria’s security forces are, it appears that ordinary Syrians who aren’t engaged in any political activity cannot have a private conversation exchanging opinions about their government, in a restaurant, or even in their own homes,” said Whitson.
”Instead of addressing the country’s genuine problems of poverty, corruption, and a stunted political environment, the Syrian authorities expend national resources spying on their own people.”
Assad, whose country Washington accuses of supporting terrorism, returned to the international fold last year with a visit to Paris, and since then relations with the world community have thawed.
Three delegations of US lawmakers met him in Damascus last week, including high-ranking Senator John Kerry, as Washington reviews policies toward countries which the previous administration regarded as hostile.
HRW said Syria must ”dissolve the court” and ”decriminalise free expression and peaceful association by revising the vague overbroad statutes in the penal code”.
It also urged the EU and the US ”to condition any further progress in their relations with Syria … on abolition of the [court] and concrete improvements in Syria’s human rights situation”.
HRW said it spoke to former defendants, lawyers and human rights activists in Syria and based its report on ”trial notes taken by Western diplomats who are the only outside observers to have access to the courts.”
It said that defendants have no chance of ”proving their innocence against the bogus charges brought against them”, cannot appeal their verdict to a higher tribunal and that most trials consist of ”four short sessions”. — Sapa-AFP