Ileana Ros-Lehtinen: “today I wish to call the attention of the Members to the important cause of defending the human rights of the Syrian…”

“today I wish to call the attention of the Members to the important cause of defending the human rights of the Syrian people and holding the Syrian regime accountable for the most deplorable actions against its citizens. Syria is an oppressor state in every sense. It brutally stifles its political dissidents and minority groups. It denies its ordinary citizens freedom of religion, of conscience and belief. It seeks to silence its people by preventing them from exercising their right of free speech. It discriminates against women, condoning violence and sexual assault against them. The police continue to detain people arbitrarily, placing them in prisons and torturing them, using methods that seem to herald back to the return of the Middle Ages, stretching prisoners on racks or fracturing their spines on wheels. Since 1963, Syria has ruled under emergency law, using the hollow excuse of Israel being a threat, and using that to suppress freedom, diversity of opinion, and equality between religions and between sexes. About 600 Lebanese detainees have been languishing in Syrian jails since 1989. Those who have managed to escape bring harrowing stories with them that they have told to the international human rights community. They must be released immediately. In an event that defies comprehension, in 1982, Rifaat al-Assad, the brother of then dictator Hafez al-Assad, turned his Soviet-made guns against the Syrian city of Hama.…”