Netherlands to file lawsuit against Syrian government to International Court
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (North Press) – Stef Blok, Dutch’s minister of Foreign Affairs told parliament on Friday, Netherlands prepares a case against Syrian government at the U.N.’s highest court.
Blok said that the case sought to hold President Bashar al-Assad and his government accountable for human rights violations, including torture and the use of chemical weapons.
“Today the Netherlands announced its decision to hold Syria responsible under international law for gross human rights violations and torture in particular,” Foreign Minister Stef Blok wrote in a letter to legislators.
It cites Syria’s obligation to uphold the U.N. Convention against Torture, which Damascus ratified in 2004.
Netherlands decided to take action after Russia blocked multiple efforts at United Nations Security Council to refer a case on human rights violations in Syria to the International Criminal Court,
International Criminal Court, which based in Hague, prosecutes individuals for war crimes and is also.
Stef Blok said, “Assad regime has committed horrific crimes time after time, the evidence is overwhelming, there must be consequences.”
The Dutch side reminded the Syrian government of its commitment to respect the United Nations Convention against Torture, which Damascus ratified in 2004.
He added in his letter that large numbers of Syrians had been tortured, murdered, forcibly disappeared, and subjected to poison-gas attacks, or had lost everything fleeing for their lives.
Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok on Wednesday had called for de-escalation and a no-fly zone to be established in Syria’s war-torn Idlib province in March 2020.
Dutch Foreign Minister Steve Blok said that the war that has been going on for about ten years in Syria has claimed at least 200,000 lives, while 100 thousand are still missing, and 5.5 / million have been forced to flee to neighboring countries.
The unrest in Syria, part of a wider wave of the 2011 Arab Spring protests, grew out of discontent with the Syrian government and escalated to an armed conflict after protests calling for Assad’s removal were violently suppressed.
The war, which began on March 15, 2011, with major unrest in Damascus and Aleppo, then developed to armed fighting between different groups.
The UN commission recently noted that what Assad government has done amounts to crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder, rape, and torture.
What does not get enough attention is the part of Assad’s criminality that is most difficult to see: that which takes place in the prisons, a vast network of concentration camps where torture and murder is routine.
(Reporting by Mohammed Khier Ahmed)