Syria chides activists over EU pact comments
Daily Star, Beirut
Syria chides activists over EU pact comments
Compiled by Daily Star staff
Thursday, June 23, 2005
The Syrian government has taken prominent human rights activists to task for calling on the EU not to sign a billion-dollar trade deal with Damascus due to its poor human rights record.
"In asking the EU not to sign the association agreement with Syria, lawyer Anwar Bunni and his colleagues are damaging the interests of the homeland in the eyes of a foreign delegation," state daily Ath-Thawra said.
The newspaper accused them of "adopting the same stance as that of foreign forces putting pressure on Syria, such as Zionism and the U.S." The militants, it said, "talk big about human rights and democracy, but they oppose the rights of their own country and invite organizations [to act] against their people."
Bunni responded to the Ath-Thawra article by saying he hoped it would be the "beginning of a dialogue on the national interest and not an attempt to justify a [new] campaign of arrests. The interests of the nation lie in respect for civil society’s rights, an independent judiciary, the release of political detainees and the battle against corruption," he said. "The association agreement contains a key clause on human rights that everyone has the right to discuss."
Bunni and two other rights activists met last week with a visiting EU parliamentary delegation. The activists argued against an EU signature of the association agreement, initialed in October 2004.
Unless the "government respects human rights by freeing political detainees, and by freeing the press and getting rid of emergency laws and security courts," the accord should not be signed, Bunni said he told the delegation. "Otherwise the partnership agreement will be reached with a non-democratic government. It will be an additional method for this government to suppress the Syrian people even more," he said.
Syria is the only country in the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership not to have signed an agreement as part of a free trade zone envisioned for 2010.
Syria is hoping that signing the agreement will bring in substantial financial aid from the EU and help reverse the country’s international isolation.
The EU had conditioned the deal on full Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and on non-interference in the Lebanese parliamentary elections, which concluded Sunday. In April, the EU invited U.S.-based opposition leader Farid Ghadry to Brussels to argue against signing the agreement until Syria improved its treatment of dissidents. - With agencies
