Far From Justice - Human Rights Watch

parties other than the ruling Ba`ath Party, felt compelled to criticize them. In a major publicstatement of September 27, 1979, it called on the regime to “restrict the jurisdiction of thestate security courts to crimes against the security of the state.” 54 Speaking in early 1980 atthe Ba`ath Congress, President Hafez al-Asad himself called for “the establishment ofordinary courts’ dominance over the special courts as soon as possible” and declared thatinstructions had been issued to the SSSC to avoid looking into any case that did not dealwith security. 55Such pronouncements proved worthless. Instead of promoting ordinary courts, the Syrianauthorities in the 1980s—a decade known for violent confrontations between the authoritiesand the opposition, notably the Muslim Brotherhood—proceeded to further ignore courtprocedures in favor of holding detainees without trials. 56 A review of publicly availableinformation on the SSSC does not reveal whether the court was active in the 1980s orwhether the authorities had completely suspended its operations.The SSSC resumed its activities in 1992, when the Syrian authorities began trying before thecourt hundreds of political activists, including communists, pan-Arab Nasserites, IraqiBa`athists, independent political activists, and Muslim Brotherhood members who had beenarrested as long ago as 1980 but who had not been brought to any court following theirarrest. 57The reason for the change in the government’s strategy in dealing with political prisoners isunknown. It may have been part of a larger shift in official Syria policy to provide some sortof legal cover to the continuing detention of thousands of political detainees. In parallel toreferring hundreds of defendants to the SSSC, president Hafez al-Asad issued an amnestyfor some 3,500 long term detainees in late 1991. 58One of the very first cases tried by the SSSC in 1992 involved the prosecution of humanrights activists from the Committees for the Defense of Democratic Freedoms and HumanRights in Syria (CDF). Security services had arrested them in late 1991 and early 1992, and54 Ibid, p. 27.55 Ibid.56 For more information on detention without trial in the 1980’s, see Human Rights Watch/Middle East, Throwing Away the Key,October 1992, pp. 8-9; Middle East Watch (now Human Rights Watch/MENA), Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of HumanRights by the Asad Regime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), Ch. 2.57 For more information on the SSSC’s activities in 1992, see Human Rights Watch/Middle East, Syria –The Price of Dissent,vol. 7, no. 4, July 1995.58 Human Rights Watch, Throwing Away The Key, p. 1.19 Human Rights Watch February 2009