Since the March 2011 uprising, a number of decrees and laws have been passed in regime-controlled areas of Syria that significantly implicate, affect, and punish the exercise of key rights at the heart of organizing on the ground and online, including the rights to freedom of expression, association, assembly, political participation, and access to information.
Together these pieces of legislation provide unique insight into how the Syrian regime has used law as a tool to restrict key fundamental rights and to normalize years of mass atrocity. This fact sheet, put together by TIMEP’s Legal Unit, tracks and spotlights some of the key laws in question, from a Counterterrorism Law that has subjected journalists, lawyers, and activists to terrorism prosecutions, to an Urban Renewal Law that disproportionately penalizes former opposition strongholds and entrenches the impacts of forced displacement and demographic change.