The United Nations may appoint a specialist to oversee the release of Syrian detainees, and ensure the naming of the detainees does not lead to their harm or to their relatives being attacked.
Syrian prisoner exchanges, seen as critical to further confidence-building between the parties in the five-year civil war, were identified as a priority at last week’s meeting between Vladimir Putin and the US secretary of state, John Kerry, in Moscow. They were repeatedly raised at the Geneva peace talks last week, but with little sign of progress.
A western diplomat said: “I am confident that the United Nations has a plan for this, including commitments that if a detainee is named he will not be mistreated and will be handled by international norms. There needs to be a system.
“There is a danger that if anyone is named the regime then knows they are of value to the opposition, and there is a likelihood they will be mistreated.
“In the past names were suggested for release, people got hurt in detention and none of it was very happy. This time a lot more thought is going into how you do no harm to detainees. There needs to be a lot more care, discretion and more of a UN-led process. “The aim is to develop a system that has more integrity than just banging the table and demanding someone’s release.”
The initial focus will be on women, children and the injured. It is not clear how many pro-Assad troops have been detained by the opposition because of the difficulties of obtaining accurate figures for missing or imprisoned individuals. An Amnesty International report released in November found that at least 65,116 people had been “forcibly disappeared” by the Assad regime since the mass demonstrations of 2011 that morphed into a civil war that has killed more than 250,000.
The Geneva talks have been suspended until 9 April at the earliest, but the UN Syrian special envoy Staffan de Mistura is keen to maintain momentum in the interim.
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