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	Nearly 128,000 people are missing inside secret prisons run by the Syrian government by New York Times Syria   May 2019   Nearly 128,000 people are missing inside a sprawling system of secret prisons run by the Syrian government. Hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have passed through it since the Syrian uprising began in 2011, as the authorities used torture and the fear of it to crack down on opposition to President Bashar al-Assad.   The Syrian government has denied the existence of systematic abuse but government memos smuggled out of the country show that officials who reported directly to Mr. al-Assad ordered crackdowns on civilians and knew of atrocities. They ordered harsh treatment of specific detainees and complained of increasing detainee deaths as corpses piled up and decomposed. One government memo urged personnel to complete paperwork to protect officials from future prosecution.   While the Syrian military fought armed rebels for territory, the prison system was the government's main weapon against the civilian opposition. Imprisonment and torture crushed the civil protest movement and helped drive the opposition into an armed conflict it could not win.   Detainees are regularly beaten, hung by their wrists, beaten while crammed inside tires, shocked with electricity and sexually assaulted. Other forms of torture included dousing prisoners with fuel and burning them.   Cells are often so crowded that detainees take turns lying down to sleep. Food is scarce. Toilets are often absent, diarrhea rampant. Injuries and illnesses, usually left untreated, lead to lingering deaths.   While ISIS's brutality has captured world attention, the Syrian prisons have far more victims, accounting for 90 percent of those detained or disappeared during the country's civil war, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. The group has documented the deaths of 14,000 people 'under torture' in government prisons.   Syria is somewhat fading from world attention. Yet the security forces are ramping up arrests. Detainees have smuggled out warnings that hundreds are being sent to an execution site, and newly released prisoners report that killings are accelerating.   Fear of arrest and torture is one reason that more than five million refugees outside Syria are unlikely to return to the country when the war ends.   http://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/world/middleeast/syria-torture-practices.html http://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/world/middleeast/syria-torture-prisons.html Visit the related web page
	Holding Governments Accountable for the Sustainable Development Goals by OHCHR, TAP Network, agencies   June 2019   Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on Sustainable Development Goal 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions.   'The construction of peaceful and just societies, with effective, accountable and inclusive institutions, ensures human rights. It drives development that is sustainable because it is deep, broad, and self-regenerating. It is also key to ensuring relationships and partnerships not only within countries, but also between countries.   I'd like to highlight two numbers from a recent report by the Task Force on Justice, as they speak to the scale and the complexity of the issues we are dealing with.   First, an estimated quarter of a billion people are living in extreme conditions of injustice, deprived of any meaningful protection of the law. This includes the stateless, people living in conflict zones, modern day slaves.   Second, the report estimates that 4.5 billion people, 60 percent of the people on this planet are excluded from social, economic, and political protections and opportunities which the law should provide.   They may lack land tenure, residency papers, housing documentation or may be employed without contracts in the informal sector.   As a result, they are deprived of adequate access to healthcare, education, bank loans and specific types of jobs, and may have limited access to institutions, which should represent, express, protect and enforce rights such as political processes, the courts and the police. The most vulnerable are the most likely to fall into the trap of disempowerment.   Development is a comprehensive and complex economic, social and political process. And this process is about human rights: about the right to development; about economic, social and cultural rights; and also about the civil and political rights which uphold people's capacity and right to raise their voices, and participate in decisions.   The multiple and overlapping structural impediments that prevent justice from being done, express the relevance of indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights. As the 2030 Agenda recognizes, freedom from fear and freedom from want cannot be achieved in isolation from each other.   This is why the concept of SDG16 plus is so persuasive. Because the multifaceted disempowerment of those who are left behind will not be adequately addressed if we adopt fragmented approaches, designed in silos and applied as band-aids.   We need integrated approaches, grounded in broad participation, which build on the mutually reinforcing work of many communities'.   http://www.justice.sdg16.plus/report http://www.sdgaccountability.org http://tapnetwork2030.org/empowermentreport/ Visit the related web page
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