Kurdish folk singer ‘Abd al-Rahman Mohammed ‘Omar, who performs under the name of Bavê Selah, was released on 5 March, after being arrested by Syrian security forces on 24 January.

‘Abd al-Rahman Mohammed ‘Omar was arrested by Military Security at his home in Aleppo, in north-west Syria, on 24 January and was held incommunicado at an unknown location until his release on 5 March.

Three Kurdish prisoners of conscience, on trial before a Syrian special court since 6 June 2010, remain without access to their lawyers ahead of their next court hearing on 13 March 2011. The men’s lawyers have announced that they are now boycotting the trial in protest.

Three Kurdish political activists remain incommunicado after more than one year in detention. The third session of their trial, postponed from 19 October when the men were inexplicably not brought to the hearing, is due to be on 6 February. They remain at risk of torture and other ill-treatment.

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A former Kurdish prisoner in Syria described torture in the prison as follow "they were four men who tortured me. They beat me with a whip, with a woodblock, with their feet and hands. They beat me everywhere and so hard on my head, my ears and eyes, on my back, my legs and everywhere until I reached the point of not feeling any pain then everything became dark".

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Illegal invaders or victims of a nationalistic policy?

With Decree No. 93 on August 23, 1962, the Syrian government ordered a special census for al-Hasakah province, which was carried out on October 5, 1962. As a result, approximately 120,000 Kurds lost their Syrian citizenship and with it, their basic civil rights. Since the descendants of these people registered as stateless (ajanib, sing. ajnabi/ajnabiyah, literally »foreigners«) are likewise stateless, the number of those affected has continued to rise over the last decades.

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Geneva, 12 – 13 November 2009

Thank you, Mr/s. Chairman, for giving me the floor. My name is Jian Badrakhan, I am from YASA, the Kurdish Centre for Legal Studies & Consultancy. Our Organization advocates for the rights of Kurdish People in Syria, the population of which is estimated to be about 3 million.

The Syrian government has described the Kurds in Syria as a part of the Syrian society, however, officially in Syria no other nation but the Arabs exists. The constitution mentions in the preamble the role of the Arab nation only, and those who are part of building human civilization but nothing about the other people based in Syria. In addition, it can be read in Article 1 section (2) that the Syrian Arab  country is a part of the Arab homeland and in section (3) that the people in the Syrian Arab country are a part of the Arab nation. They work and struggle to achieve the Arab nation's comprehensive unity. Still today, Kurds in Syria are not officially recognized as an ethnic group and the existence of the Kurdish minority as such, is still officially denied.

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In March 2004, Syria’s Kurds held large-scale demonstrations, some violent, in a number of towns and villages throughout northern Syria, to protest their treatment by the Syrian authorities—the first time they had held such massive demonstrations in the country. While the protests occurred as an immediate response to the shooting by security forces of Kurdish soccer fans engaged in a fight with Arab supporters of a rival team, they were driven by long-simmering Kurdish grievances about discrimination against their community and repression of their political and cultural rights. The scale of the mobilization alarmed the Syrian authorities, who reacted with lethal force to quell the protests. In the final tally, at least 36 people were killed, most of them Kurds, and over 160 people were injured. The security services detained more than 2,000 Kurds (many were later amnestied), with widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment of the detainees.