Syrian Kurdish human rights worker is threatened with life imprisonment

Syrian Kurdish human rights worker Mashal Tamo is threatened with life imprisonment and hard labour according to information received by the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV). In accordance with Paragraph 298 of the Syrian constitution he will be sentenced to this hard punishment if the court in Damascus finds him guilty of trying to start a civil war.

"But the charges which are being brought against our correspondent are absurd! Mashal Tamo categorically rejects all forms of violence in solving political questions”, said the GfbV Near-east consultant, Kamal Sido, on Monday. It seems clear that the courageous human rights expert is to be silenced. The father of six children has been reporting regularly to the GfbV on the situation of the Kurds in Syria. It is also being held against him that he has weakened and damaged the authority of the state and the national identity, which is tantamount to an infringement of Paragraph 285.

Mashal Tamo was taken away in the night of 14th – 15th August 2008 in the town of al-Arab in the north of Syria by a patrol of the Syrian secret service. His relatives were refused any information as to his whereabouts for several days and his private car was confiscated.

The GfbV was finally able to establish that the human rights worker is being held in the al-Adra prison near Damascus in a cell with criminals. Beforehand the GfbV had alarmed the German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and his French colleague, Bernard Kouchner, and all EU and West-European embassies in Damascus with the request that they take measures to help Tamo. The human rights organisation also wrote to the Syrian President, Al-Assad, and his ministers for defence, justice and foreign affairs with the appeal that Tamo’s whereabouts be announced and that he be released. The GfbV representative at the United Nations likewise made a request for his release to the representative of the Syrian Arab Republic in New York