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Syria has released around 11,000 detainees since the declaration of a general amnesty in June, Syria’s National Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar said. However, several rights groups claim that over 200,000 people are still withering away in government jails.
Haider on Monday told AFP that “11,000 people have benefited from the amnesty and been released from prison”, referring to the “general amnesty” announced by Syrian President Bashar Assad after his controversial re-election.
He added that the number will rise gradually as the Justice ministry, in charge of overseeing the presidential decree, continues to examine prisoner files.
The Syrian regime presents the amnesty as the largest amnesty decreed since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011. It also is the first amnesty to include people accused of crimes under the controversial “anti-terrorism” law that has been used to jail both armed and peaceful opponents of the regime.
However, monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights disputes the regime’s figures, saying that the actual number of people released is likely closer to 7,000 people.
“Between 70,000 and 80,000 detainees were supposed to benefit from the amnesty, and only 10 percent of them have been released”, Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said.
Several high-profile journalists, activists and lawyers, like Mazen Darwish and Khalil Maatuq, and are still in prison. According to Rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni, many of the released were not detained as political prisoners but were common criminals not meant to be covered by the decree.
“Security services have refused to meet with the committees charged with applying the amnesty. In fact, the amnesty decree has benefited very few people”, he said.
In a few cases, tribunals considering prisoners to be set free simply changed the charge against them so that they wouldn’t be covered by the amnesty anymore, al-Bunni added.
He also said that the reported figure of 200,000 detainees in Syrian prisons is “exaggerated”.
“They have no documents. We have asked them multiple times to give us the names so we could cooperate together to solve the problem”, he added.
