Human rights in Ba'athist Syria

During the six decades of its rule, the security apparatus banned all social, political and economic groups independent of the Ba'ath party or the regime; ensuring that the state had total monopoly over all forms of organizations.

[13] After an initial period of economic liberalization that failed to improve human rights in the early 2000s,[14] Bashar al-Assad launched a string of crackdowns that imprisoned numerous intellectuals and cultural activists; thereby ending the Damascus Spring.

[15] At the onset of the Arab Spring in 2011, the country's human rights situation remained among the worst in the world; characterized by arbitrary arrests, mass surveillance by the dreaded secret police and systematic repression of ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds.

[16] The government was guilty of crimes against humanity based on witness accounts of deaths in custody[17] including extrajudicial executions,[a] torture,[b] rape,[c] arbitrary detentions, ethnic cleansing, genocides, massacres, state terrorism and forced disappearances[30] during the crackdown against the 2011 Syrian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War.

The new regime implemented social engineering policies such as large-scale confiscation of properties, state directed re-distribution of lands and wealth, massive censorship, elimination of independent publishing centres, nationalization of banks, education system and industries.

Hafez ruled Syria for three decades, deploying repressive measures ranging from censorship to violent methods of state terror such as mass murders, deportations and practices such as torture, which were unleashed collectively upon the civilian population.

[40] SS-Haupsturmfuhrer Alois Brunner, who played a significant role in the implementation of the Holocaust as the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, assisted al-Assad in organizing the Ba'athist secret police and trained them on Nazi Germany's torture practices.

[45] A 1983 report published by Amnesty International revealed that Assad regime routinely committed mass-executions of alleged dissidents and engaged in the extensive torture of prisoners of conscience.

[2] Various torture techniques deployed in Syrian detention centres and prisons include routine beatings, rapes, sexual violence, "Bisat al-rih" (flying carpet), etc.

[74][75] On 6 July 2020, families of detainees in Syrian government prisons found the pictures of their dead relatives in the media graphics of a forensic police photographer-turned-whistleblower, codenamed, Caesar.

Chilling revelations of torture, rapes, massacres, extermination were revealed through the 2014 Caesar Report, which documented photographic evidences of industrial-scale atrocities occurring in Syrian military prisons.

[81][82][83] In a separate statement, Dutch Foreign Ministry accused Bashar al-Assad of committing severe human rights violations, war crimes and inhumane tactics against the Syrian people "on a grand scale".

[84] The joint proceedings were after repeated Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council that blocked efforts to prosecute Bashar al-Assad over war crimes in International Criminal Court.

Their bodies were discovered by border police in a cave in the Zabdani Mountains northwest of Damascus along with the remains of two Jewish boys, Natan Shaya, 18 and Kassem Abadi 20, victims of an earlier massacre.

In 2010, The Economist newspaper described Syrian government as "the worst offender among Arab states", that engaged in imposing travel bans and restricted free movement of people.

From July 2013, in certain villages in Syria (namely Mosul, Raqqu and Deir el-Zour), ISIS no longer allow women to appear in public alone, they must be accompanied by a male relative/guardian known as a mahram.

[119] In addition to filtering a wide range of Web content, the Ba'athist Syrian government monitored Internet use very closely and detained citizens "for expressing their opinions or reporting information online."

Vague and broadly worded laws invite government abuse and have prompted Internet users to engage in self-censorship to avoid the state's ambiguous grounds for arrest.

With state impunity granted by the Assad regime, officers of the Mukhabarat wielded pervasive influence over local bodies, civil associations and bureaucracy, where they played a major role in shaping Ba'athist administrative decisions.

[127] Several academics have described the military, bureaucratic, and secret police apparatus of the Ba'athist state as constituting a pyramidal socio-political structure with an Orwellian surveillance system designed to neutralize independent civic activities and political dissent from its very onset.

The Assad regime had intensified its web censorship and cyber-monitoring during the course of the Syrian civil war and its cyber forces engaged in several social engineering techniques and surveillance measures such as phishing, malware attacks and the interception of Skype calls.

[69] As the revolution spread across all the provinces in Syria, the Crisis Management Cell decided to intensify the repression by unleashing more violence and co-ordinate the security response, in a Ba'ath Party meeting.

While Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that both sides in the conflict appeared to have committed war crimes in 2012,[132] United Nations' Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria also blamed the vast majority of atrocities on the Assad government forces.

[69][136] In December 2018, CIJA chief Stephen Rapp who formerly served as the US Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice, stated that war-crimes committed by the Syrian regime constituted a "solid kind of evidence that we haven't really had since Nuremberg, when the Nazis were prosecuted."

A 2016 United Nations investigative report described the detainees in Syrian prisons as suffering under "inhuman living conditions" characterized by unclean environment, lack of sanitation and food as well as systematic torture.

These methods are often used in combination during multiple sessions over the course of days, weeks or months... detainees are held in subhuman conditions and systematically denied their basic needs, including food, water, medicine, medical care and sanitation.

"[142]On 23 April 2020, two ex-Syrian secret police officers, Anwar R. and Eyad A., accused of committing war crimes in Syria's government-run detention center, appeared in a German court for a first of its kind trial.

[148] In June 2023, UN General Assembly voted in favour of establishing an independent body to investigate the whereabouts hundreds of thousands of missing civilians who have been forcibly disappeared, killed or languishing in Syrian government prisons.

[151] Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated in March 2012 that Syrian military forces and Ba'athist paramilitaries were systemically abducting, detaining and torturing children.

[152] Suggesting that the UN Security Council should turn Bashar al-Assad over for prosecution in the International Criminal Court (ICC), Navi Pillay said: "They've gone for the children - for whatever purposes - in large numbers.