By Ali Al-Bassam
Impunity Watch Reporter, Middle East

DAMASCUS, Syria — Human rights complaints have increased in Syria, as United Nations human rights investigators said last Monday in a press conference in Geneva that they have drafted a new secret list of Syrians they suspect of committing war crimes.

“We have good evidence in terms of summary executions, forced disappearance, arbitrary detentions, torture and sexual violence from both sides,” said Paulo Pinhero, head of the investigative panel.  The UN decided not to publicly release the names on its list, because “the commissions follow a lower standard of inquiry as compared to the courts of law,” Pinhero said.

Pinhero also said of the violations that they were “a dramatic escalation, indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the form of air strikes and artillery shelling leveled against residential neighborhoods.”

The report states that the incidents occurred in the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, and also in the coastal region of Latakia.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports that opposition groups must also shoulder the blame for human rights violations.  Even though opposition forces have told HRW that “they have taken measures to curb abuses,” the organization still believes that opposition forces have participated in the acts of torture and unlawful executions.

HRW spoke to a prisoner named “Sameer,” who was captured by the Free Syrian Army in early August, and claims that he was tortured by opposition forces when they beat the soles of his feet with a wooden stick for about two hours until he confessed.

HRW also documented more than a dozen extrajudicial and summary executions by opposition forces, claiming that two FSA fighters informed them of executing four people after the battalion stormed a police station in the town of Haffa, executing two people immediately after capture, and the others after a trial.

While western governments are seeking another condemnation of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, Faysal Khabbaz Hamouia, a representative of the Syrian government, had slammed the report, calling it inaccurate and biased.  Hamouia also claims that the international community is guilty of “stoking the flames of the conflict,” while 17 countries were sending “jihadist terrorists” to fight for the “fragmentation of the Middle East into Islamic emirates.”

Lakhdar Brahimi, the joint UN-Arab League envoy to Syria, met with Assad in Damascus last Sunday, where he said that the Syrian conflict threatens both the region and the world.  “The crisis is getting worse, and it is a threat to the Syrian people, the region and the world,” said Brahimi.

The UN currently places the death toll in Syria at 20,000.

For further information, please see:

Al Jazeera — Widespread Rights Abuses Alleged in Syria — 17 September 2012

Human Rights Watch — Syria: End Opposition Use of Torture, Executions — 17 September 2012

Middle East Online — UN Probe Seeks ‘Appropriate Action’ as Syria Abuses Soar — 17 September 2012

The Telegraph — UN Expands Secret List of War Crimes Suspects — 17 September 2012