To this day, the UN General Assembly continues to open its doors to Syrian regime representatives, including the incumbent Syrian Foreign Minister, Walid Muallem, and to their accompanying delegations. For the eighth consecutive year, each September, the Syrian regime’s mission has the UN floor to speak and hold meetings inside its halls, using all of these opportunities in the service of its agenda to rationalize and defend the regime’s systematic violations against the Syrian people which constitute innumerable crimes against humanity and war crimes. These egregious violations, which have been documented by the UN organs themselves, most notably include extrajudicial killing, torture, enforced-disappearance, the use of chemical weapons, siege, indiscriminate bombardment, and the bombing of hospitals and schools.
In this context, two main points need to be clarified:
A. The Security Council has taken action and adopted 18 Resolutions on Syria. The Syrian regime, however, has not categorically adhered to these Resolutions. According to the Charter of the United Nations, the UN General Assembly is within its rights to suspend a membership of a Member State and withdraw all of said state’s privileges. In the event that the Charter of the United Nations has been infringed on multiple occasions, which the Syrian regime has done over the course of the past eight years, the UN General Assembly has the power to terminate this state’s membership on a Security Council recommendation. While a recommendation of this sort should have been submitted in light of the fact that the Syrian regime’s crimes pose a clear threat to the international peace and security, this has never come to pass.
B. The need to preserve collective security, as established in Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, compels the states of the world to cooperate under the umbrella of the UN to act collectively against any state that violates the general terms of international law. SNHR calls for urgent action to provide sustained protection for the Syrian people from the current ruling regime which dedicates the Syrian state’s resources and fortunes to killing Syrian people and terrorizing Syrian society. Additionally, SNHR stresses that this is a collective responsibility borne by all the world’s states, rather than being solely the Security Council’s responsibility. The Syrian crisis has largely impacted the entirety of the international community.