Caesar Act 25 months on | Nearly 200 civilians die under torture in regime prisons

In mid-December 2019, the US Senate passed “Caesar Act”. The Act was aimed at exerting pressure on the Syrian regime by imposing economic sanctions and prosecuting individuals and companies that finance the regime, whether Syrian or foreign.

The Act also allows freezing their assets, as well as imposing restrictions on the movement of economic exchange between the regime and its allies regarding funding and other military supplies and materials in order to exert pressure on the regime of Bashar Al-Assad to release detainees and stop the killing machine that has been claiming the lives of innocent Syrians for over a decade.

This followed the thousands of images of torture and documents that were leaked from inside the regime’s detention centres in early 2014, and estimated at 55 thousand photos documenting the killings of 11 thousand prisoners tortured in Al-Assad’s prisons, among tens of thousands who were killed inside the regime’s prisons under torture.

Over two year has passed since “Caesar Act” ratified and nothing has changed at all. The regime has not released the detainees, nor stopped the killing machine, whether in or out of detention.

According to Syrian Observatory statistics, over 194 prisoners, including women, have died under torture in regime security and prisons since “Caesar Act” was passed till now. SOHR is not disclosing the names of 43 other victims at the request of their families.

The economic Caesar sanctions’ impacts deepen the suffering of the Syrian people in regime-controlled areas. Regime always invokes economic sanctions to justify its inability to find solutions to the living crises that plague the lives of civilians. However, regime fascists live in prosperity as if nothing had happened in Syria at all, and the war has also increased their luxury and prosperity.

Bashar Al-Assad regime takes the economic sanctions as a major obstacle to addressing civilians’ living conditions, but the regime can find a solution by releasing tens of thousands of detainees and forcibly people and uncovering their fate, in order to the US lift the sanctions on the regime.

 

It must be great public pressure exerted on the regime for two main reasons, one for the release of detainees and the other for putting an end to the suffering of poor civilians.

According to Syrian Observatory statistics, the number of detainees remaining in the regime’s prisons reached 152,713, including 41,312 women.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights renews its demand for the immediate release of detainees in the
security prisons of the regime and for the disclosure of the fate of the missing and forcibly disappeared people.

The Syrian Observatory stresses that all blame falls on the regime of Bashar Al-Assad for worsening the living conditions that plague the lives of civilians across Syria as the regime tightens security grip and takes “Caesar sanctions” as a pretext to justify dire living conditions that deepen people suffering.

SOHR stresses the need for holding accountable all those who aided and abetted the killing and torturing of Syrian civilians in regime prisons and warns against indifference by the warring powers in Syria to the issue of detainees and forcibly disappearing.

SOHR also appeals to the international community to seriously intensify its efforts to disclose the fate of the detainees and forcibly disappeared people and identify.

 

Since the beginning of the Syrian Revolution, SOHR managed to document 47,517, all documented by names: 47,114 men and young men, 339 children under the age of eighteen, and 64 women over the age of eighteen., out of a total of 105,000 deaths that took place in regime detention centres, according to SOHR statistics.

 

Reliable SOHR sources within the Syrian regime’s security services have confirmed that these 105,000 civilians have been executed and killed inside the prisons of the regime and its intelligence forces, among whom more than 83% have been killed, and executed inside these detention centres since May 2013 to October 2015. SOHR

sources also confirmed that more than 30,000 detainees were killed inside the notorious Seidnaya prison alone, while the Air Force Intelligence prisons came in the second place in terms of the number of deaths.