Syria - RADWAN ZIADEH, Damascus Centre for Human Rights Studies
Radwan Ziadeh is the Director of the Damascus Centre for Human Rights Studies, an independent non-governmental organisation which works to protect and to strengthen human rights. The centre aims for the creation and advancement of the culture of human rights in society by way of adopting theoretical and academic programmes that encompass studies, research and the holding of conferences, seminars, tutorial classes and courses that ultimately serve the field of human rights.
The organisation also issues a monthly bulletin and quarterly magazine dealing with human rights issues. Another important element of the work is the programme "Youth and Human Rights" which involves organising workshops for young people.
"Syrians have found – despite their resentment about the means used to transfer power between Alasad Sr and Alasad Jn – an opportunity to express their fears about the future of their country. Also, the intellectuals and activists have used this situation to create spaces for the free expression of ideas, given their deep awareness of the need for change . This first spark triggered the process here to establish “Civil society Associations” to create critical dialogue between society and the state, in the interests of the homeland.
So Syrians discovered politics as something new and the cultural and political forums which created the movement known as the “Damascus spring” started. After that the “National Dialogue Forum” was set up by the former deputy Riad Saif using his relative parliamentary immunity. The forum started its work on 13th of September 2000 with a lecture about civil society.
During that lecture I became obsessed with the idea of creating public activism, especially as I have participated in defence of the concept of human rights from an early stage and wrote a book about “The March Towards Human Rights in Syria” issued in 1999 and published in Beirut but which was banned from being distributed in Syria.
This encouraged me to get actively involved during the time of “the Damascus Spring” in order to mix the theoretical experience with the practical. My first participation was with some activists in setting up the “National Dialogue Forum” which sponsored a serious intellectual debate between the different spectrums of Syrian society about different political, economic and social issues. Then all the lectures which took place in the Forum were collected in a book entitled “Towards a Civil Society in Syria: Dialogues of the “National Dialogue Forum”. The lectures from the forum met with a remarkable degree of interest from the public and the Syrian, Arabic and international media.
The story of the “National Dalogue Forum” reflects the experience of “the Damascus Spring” itself from the beginning. The establishment of the Forum was the first spark that initiated “the Spring”, and its closure in February 2001 was the beginning of the end for the Damascus Spring” when its leader, deputy Riad Saif, was taken in for interrogation after the removal of his partial immunity. After re-launching it in September 2001, eight of the active members on its committee, who organised the dialogues, were detained and this was the end of that “Spring”.
Like other human rights defenders, I faced lot of harassment and accusations including: threats of arrest and travel bans at different times, the last of which was on 26th of 2006 when I was on my way to Jordan to attend a conference on the subject of “Human Rights in a Penal Justice Frame” which took place under the patronage of Mr. Umar Moussa, the General Secretary of the Arab League.
Human rights organisations in Syria suffer from many obstacles including the fact that: they are not given legal licenses, that they are working in an unstable security and political environment and that the Syrian authorities have not given a licence to any of these human rights organisations. However, I am confident that the Syrian human rights organisations will be able to prove themselves through their ongoing work, the expression of a future vision for human rights in Syria and the development and delivery of clear policies."