In July, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution strongly condemning “the continued use of involuntary or enforced disappearances in the Syrian Arab Republic... which have been carried out with consistency, in particular by the Syrian regime”. The British Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, who presented the resolution for adoption, spoke of “a deliberate act of unspeakable cruelty”, referring to the regime’s knowledge of the fate of the disappeared but staunch refusal to share this information with their families.
True and powerful words, yet they will do little to alleviate the suffering of victims and their next of kin, nor will they change the situation on the ground. A decade after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the Assad regime remains firmly in power, and the acts of barbarism inflicted on the Syrian people constitute one of the big fault lines of our times.
Humans reduced to numbers
It is difficult to grasp the sheer magnitude of enforced disappearances in Syria. According to recent estimates, since 2011 over 150,000 Syrians have been disappeared or arbitrarily detained (out of a total population of around 17 million), most of them by the regime. By comparison, during the Argentinian military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, the estimated total of desaparecidos was 30,000 (Argentina had a population of around 27 million at the time).
