UNITED NATIONS: The United States said Monday nearly 128,000 people face arbitrary detention by the Syrian regime and called for their release.
"This practice is unacceptable," US Ambassador Kelly Craft told the UN Security Council at its monthly meeting on the conflict in Syria.
"The Assad regime must release detainees and provide international monitors access to detention centers," she said.
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has declared several amnesties of prisoners since the conflict began in 2011 -- notably in 2014, 2018, and in mid-September.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin called for the "elimination of terrorists in Idlib" province, while stressing that utmost care be taken to spare civilians.
The conflict has claimed the lives of an estimated 370,000 people.
"The time has come to encourage and not impede Syria's return to the Arab family," Vershinin said.
Syria was suspended from the Arab League in 2011, and the issue of its return has divided the organization's members for more than a year.
Security Council members welcomed the creation of a UN-sponsored constitutional committee by the government and the opposition, after two years of arduous negotiations.
The UN envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, said the committee's formation marked the first concrete political agreement between the government and the opposition.
"It is also a shared promise to the Syrian people to try to agree under the auspices of the United Nations on new constitutional arrangements for Syria -- a new social contract to help repair a broken country," he said.
The committee's 150 members are supposed to hold their first meeting October 30 in Geneva.
Its revision of the constitution is viewed by the UN as a first step toward holding elections that would include the Syrian diaspora.
Last week, the Syrian regime stressed that no deadline has been set for the committee to conclude its work.
US says 128,000 Syrians subject to arbitrary detention
US says 128,000 Syrians subject to arbitrary detention
- "This practice is unacceptable," US Ambassador Kelly Craft told the UN Security Council
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
