Your Excellency President Assad,

In this sixtieth year of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I urge you to unconditionally release human rights defenders imprisoned because of their work, as well as remove barriers to civil society freedoms to express, associate and assemble.

In particular, I remain extremely concerned about the ongoing detention of human rights defender Dr. Kamal al-Labwani, who is currently serving a twelve year prison term with hard labour for "communicating with a foreign country and inciting it to initiate aggression against Syria" to which an additional three years were added by a military court for "weakening national morale".

Although Syria is a party to all major international and regional human rights treaties, I am deeply concerned about its flagrant non-adherence to their provisions, particularly in respect of freedoms of expression, association and assembly. Civil society activities in the country are also constrained through compulsory registration requirements. It is deeply troubling that only those NGOs that align themselves with the regime or government organised NGOs (GONGOs) are allowed to function in the country and registration is often denied on political grounds.

On 28 October this year, twelve peaceful pro-democracy activists were each sentenced to two and a half years in prison for simply attending a meeting of the unauthorised umbrella group, the National Council of the Damascus Declaration for Democratic National Change. Last year, in another incident of persecution of civil society members, the Head of the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research was sentenced to five years imprisonment for "spreading false information harmful to the nation" on the basis of a statement he made about the death of a man in custody due to torture.

I thank you for considering these concerns, and for ensuring they are immediately addressed.

Sincerely,