Veteran Syrian human rights lawyer faces up to 15 years in Syrian prison

Al-Maleh, a known human rights defender of people whose rights have been violated by Syria’s state security services, was charged with “conveying false news within Syria that could debilitate the morale of the nation”, “weakening national sentiment” and “slandering” a governmental body. Amnesty International said that it believes these charges have been brought against him [...]

Internet filtering in the Middle East and North Africa

The Open Net initiative just released it’s 2008-2009 report on filtering trends across the Middle East and North Africa. Overall, there has been an increase in filtering practices since 2007, and further measures to monitor Internet activities, particularly in Internet cafés, have been introduced. Additionally, countries that have been filtering political content continue to add [...]

ACLU asks U.N. to investigate case of disappeared Spanish citizen

Human rights groups today asked two U.N. Special Rapporteurs and the U.N. Working Group on Involuntary or Enforced Disappearances to investigate the case of Mustafa Setmariam Nassar, a Spanish citizen who was forcibly disappeared almost four years ago. According to media reports, Nassar, an influential Islamic theorist, was apprehended by Pakistani officials and handed over [...]

Italy expels Palestinian hijacker to Syria

A lawyer says Italian authorities are set to expel to Syria one of the Palestinians who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and killed an American passenger in 1985. Attorney Gianfranco Pagano said Youssef Magied al-Molqui was about to be flown from Palermo, Sicily, to Rome and then on to Damascus last Saturday.In April, Al-Molqui [...]

Mustafa Setmariam Nasar found in secret detention site in Syria

Human rights attorney Clive Stafford-Smith told Reuters that Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, also known as Abu Musab al-Suri, a senior al Qaeda ideologue wanted in Spain for possible links to 2004 bombings has been found in detention in Syria, in the first firm indication of his whereabouts following his capture in Pakistan in 2005.
Nasar’s arrest was [...]

UK secret service accused over arrest of two Britons in Syria

Maryam Kallis, 36, from west London, and Yasser Ahmed, 28, from Woking, Surrey, were arrested eight weeks ago on consecutive days in Damascus by Arab plainclothes officers. Lord Ahmed, a Labour life peer who is representing the families, said to The Guardian he had been told last week by a senior official at the Syrian [...]

US Country reports on Terrorism 2008

U.S. law requires the Secretary of State to provide Congress, by April 30 of each year, a full and complete report on terrorism with regard to those countries and groups meeting criteria set forth in the legislation. This annual report is entitled Country Reports on Terrorism. Read the full report here.
The state department singled out [...]

HRW urges Syria to reveal fate of 17 Held Incommunicado

According to HRW, the security services detained 13 men during an August crackdown on individuals from the northeastern district of Deir al-Zawr suspected of having ties to Islamists. Another group, detained in September, was of Syrian Kurds from the towns of Qamishli and `Ifrin suspected of belonging to an armed group called the Movement to [...]

Human Rights Watch calls for the abolishment of Syria’s Supreme State Security Court

The Supreme State Security Court “consistently ignores claims by defendants that their confessions were extracted under torture and frequently convicts them on vague and overbroad offenses that essentially criminalize freedom of expression and association,” Human Rights Watch said in a new report.
The report says the largest number of defendants were Islamists accused of espousing [...]

Amnesty International Annual Report on 2008 – focus on terrorism issues

Amnesty International is calling for a New Global Deal on human rights, because of a human rights investment gap by world leaders.
“It’s not just the economy, it’s a human rights crisis – the world is sitting on a social, political and economic time bomb,” said Irene Khan.
Read the report from May 2009 on 2008’s events [...]