Syrian regime forces arrested five civilians on June 27, 2020, when they were passing through a checkpoint in the northern entrance of county of Daraa city while they were heading to the city center and taken to an undisclosed location.
The arrests were conducted without any legal arrest warrants being issued by a court, and no members of the detainees’ families were informed of their arrest, with the phones of those arrested being confiscated, preventing them from contacting their families or lawyers. SNHR fears that they will be subjected to torture and ultimately classified as forcibly ‘disappeared’ like approximately 85 percent of those detained by the regime.
SNHR notes that about 130,000 Syrian citizens are still detained or forcibly disappeared in the Syrian regime’s detention centers, constituting a grave threat to their wellbeing given the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.