Syria: Assad issues amnesty again, reduces sentences

Syria's state-run news agency SANA says President Bashar Assad has granted amnesty for all crimes committed before Sept. 14.

According to the pardon issued Sunday, life-long terms would replace death sentences, and a 20-year-long sentence at hard labor would replace life-long sentences at hard labor, and a 20-year sentence would replace long-life sentences.

Prisoners with incurable diseases including cancer would be freed.

The decree stipulates for granting a general amnesty for military deserters to turn themselves in within 3 months for those inside the country, and 6 months for those outside the country.

Similar amnesties have been issued on several occasions - most recently last year - since Syria's conflict began in March 2011.

Syrian opposition sources said that more than 500,000 prisoners remain inside the prisons of the Syrian regime.

A report issued by the rights group on 30 April stated that 14,009 prisoners had been killed due to severe torture inside regime prisons since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

At least 3,618 cases of arbitrary arrests were documented by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) since the start of 2019.

Rosemary DiCarlo, the U.N. political chief, said last August that reports suggest that more than 100,000 people in Syria have been detained, abducted or gone missing during the eight-year conflict, with the government mainly responsible.

DiCarlo urged the warring parties Wednesday to heed the Security Council's call for the release of all those arbitrarily detained, and to provide information to families about their loved ones as required by international law.

She also reiterated U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' call for the situation in Syria to be referred to the International Criminal Court.

The 8-year-old war has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands and forced 13 million people from their homes, half of whom have left their shattered homeland.

Source: Zaman Al Wasl, Staff, September 16, 2019

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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