UN demands accountability over Syria mass disappearances

About 500,000 people were killed since the war started in 2011

Syrians shop at a market in Damascus, Syria. EPA

The UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday called for those behind “massive-scale” enforced disappearances in Syria over the past decade of conflict to be held accountable.

The resolution, presented by Britain and a number of European countries, along with the US, Turkey and Qatar, said that Syria's crisis had entered a second decade “marked by consistent patterns of gross violations".

The war in Syria has killed about 500,000 people since it started in 2011, with all sides in the increasingly complex conflict accused of war crimes.

Tuesday's resolution, adopted with 26 of the council's 47 members in favour, six opposed and 15 abstaining, voiced particular concern about the fate of tens of thousands of people who have vanished.

It condemned "the continued use of involuntary or enforced disappearances in the Syrian Arab Republic, and related human rights violations and abuses, which have been carried out with consistency, in particular by the Syrian regime".

It also criticised enforced disappearances by other parties to the conflict, including ISIS, but said the Syrian regime was the main perpetrator.

The resolution also pointed to recent comments by the UN's independent commission of inquiry on the human rights situation in Syria, indicating that “widespread enforced disappearance has been deliberately perpetrated by Syrian security forces throughout the past decade on a massive scale".

The investigators had indicated that such disappearances had been used “to spread fear, stifle dissent and as punishment”, and that tens of thousands of men, women, boys and girls detained by Syrian authorities “remain forcibly disappeared".

Presenting the resolution to the council, British Ambassador Simon Manley slammed the regime's role in such a massive number of disappearances, calling it “simply inexcusable".

The regime, he said, possessed "the bureaucratic means to provide information on these disappeared individuals, the means to end the suffering of the families and loved ones of these people".

“But it chooses not to employ those means. This is a deliberate act of unspeakable cruelty.”

He echoed a charge in the resolution, accusing Damascus's forces of “intentionally prolonging the suffering of hundreds of thousands of family members".

The resolution emphasised “the need for accountability, including for crimes committed in relation to enforced disappearance” and stressed that “accountability is vital in peace negotiations and peace-building processes".