Thousands of people have been sentenced to death without due process and political prisoners have been sentenced to decades of imprisonment under inhumane conditions and torture in military courts in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad has now ordered the dissolution of this body. For relatives of convicts, this is a long overdue step, but human rights organizations are sceptical.
Assad issued a decree ending the 1968 proclamation establishing the courts, the presidential office in Damascus announced on Sunday. “All cases referred to the military field courts should be referred to the military court system,” the statement, which was published via the Telegram online service, said to take effect immediately. A Syrian lawyer told AFP military field courts have tried civilians since the unrest in the 1980s.
Mass executions in prison after quick sentences
According to a 2017 report by human rights organization Amnesty International, the rules and procedures of military field courts are “so summary and arbitrary that they cannot be considered actual trials.” They would only last a few minutes. Thousands of people held in the notorious Sednaya Prison north of the capital Damascus were killed in mass hangings after “trials” in such a court (see tweet below).
Sunday’s decision “should have been made much sooner” but should be “taken with caution,” said an activist who asked to remain anonymous. “Especially because the regime has never acknowledged that these courts violate the human rights of the detainees.” The activist estimates that tens of thousands of people have been executed as a result of such sentences.
“At least you get a lawyer now”
Diab Serriya of the Sednaya Prison Detainees and Missing Persons Association said that if detainees were referred to military courts they would at least have a lawyer. “About 70 percent of the prisoners at the Sednaya facility were brought before the military court after 2011, which sentenced most of them to death,” he said. The civil war in Syria began in 2011 and continues to this day.
Source: Krone
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