Syria: Arrest Tantamount To Disappearance — United Nations

Chairman of the United Nations (UN) Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Paulo Pinheiro has asserted that detention in Syria is equivalent to disappearance.

Pinheiro said during a conference held in the Belgian capital, Brussels on the fate of detainees in the prisons of Bashar Al-Assad's regime.

The Middle East Monitor reports on Saturday that Pinheiro stressed that the future of tens of thousands of Syrian civilians is unknown, adding that most of them have been in the regime's prisons for ten years.

He explained that predictions indicate that most detainees have been executed and buried in mass graves, and others subjected to torture and ill-treatment.

Pinheiro added that being arrested in Syria today is tantamount to disappearing, urging the need to establish an independent mechanism with international authorities to investigate the issue of disappeared civilians.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights data, at least 132,000 civilians are currently imprisoned by the regime.

The network indicated that the regime had released only 193 people since it announced a pardon on 30 April.