Syrian Observatory for Human Rights

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The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights ( Arabic المرصد السوري لحقوق الإنسان, DMG al-marṣad as-sūrī li-ḥuqūq al-insān ; English Syrian Observatory for Human Rights ; SOHR ) is a UK- based organization that opposes the Ba'ath government in Syria that collects and publishes information about human rights violations in the country.

The SOHR is run by Osama Suleiman (pseudonym: "Rami Abdul Rahman" or "Rami Abdelrahman"), a Sunni Muslim of Syrian descent and owner of a clothing store, from his private home in Coventry , England. According to Abdulrahman, he started with 54 informants in Syria in 2006, which had grown to 230 by 2012.

An organization of the same name based in London ceased its activity in 2012 at the latest.

job

The organization's website provides news on current developments and aspects of the Syrian civil war in English and Arabic . She reports on the beheadings by the IS, on fights between the different parties to the conflict and repeatedly on massacres . For her information she relies on a network of informants living in Syria who work anonymously.

According to ARD, its appearance has become more professional since the first publications . The photos shown are now "a little less horrific". The observatory immediately denies some reports if the sources change. The people who died the day before in Syria are now counted indiscriminately in one column.

criticism

The observatory came under criticism in autumn 2011 when numerous media outlets, including CNN , spread a false report based on a SOHR report that newborn infants in the city of Hama were deliberately killed in incubators by the Syrian regime cutting off the hospital's power supply have. CNN and then SOHR referred to each other on the Internet as the source of the misinformation. The Observatory subsequently made it clear that it had not alleged that the interruption to the power supply was caused intentionally. But the fact is that the children died in the incubators.

In its casualty count up to August 2012, the observatory differentiated between civilians and soldiers, further subdividing civilians into armed rebels and unarmed civilians, and soldiers into deserters and members of the Syrian army . As a rule, this subdivision was not reflected upon in the further use of your information and was criticized. Newer daily reports from the observatory do not continue the criticized assignment of armed rebels to civilians. In addition, the observatory does not differentiate between causers in its daily balances; this is not usually reflected in the further use of its information.

Russia has questioned the observatory's credibility. The spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry , Alexander Lukashevich, stated in February 2012 that only two people work for this observatory far away from the conflict zone and that the head of the observatory claims that he has neither a journalistic education nor a higher school diploma. These facts made it possible to draw conclusions about the credibility of the information. According to a report in the New York Times , Abdul Rahman graduated from high school and attended vocational training in marketing. According to an Amnesty International representative in the Middle East, his statistics are "one of the best, including details about the circumstances of death".

The Tagesschau pointed out in an explanation that "the information from the observatory ... cannot be independently verified". “The Observatory and every other reporter from Syria have the same problem. There remains some uncertainty. "

The reputation of the observatory was briefly damaged by the fact that a website rivaling its claim as a Syrian observatory for human rights disclosed the civil identity of Osama Suleiman and the latter confirmed that he used the pseudonym Rami Abdulrahman for his many years of activism against the Syrian system under Bashar al- Assad accepted as Nom de Guerre .

Awards

In 2020, the founder Rami Abdelrahman received the Nannen Prize for documenting war crimes with the SOHR over several years .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Jonas Schaible: Ominous recorders of death . Süddeutsche.de, November 26, 2012.
  2. ^ Mohammed Abbas: Coventry - an unlikely home to prominent Syria activist . Reuters, December 8, 2011.
  3. ^ A b c Neil MacFarquhar: A Very Busy Man Behind the Syrian Civil War's Casualty Count . In: The New York Times, April 9, 2013. Retrieved February 9, 2014.
  4. ↑ Jasmin Fischer: Rami Abdulrahman counts all the dead in Syria. DerWesten , October 14, 2012.
  5. ↑ a b Volker Schwenck: Credible information from Syria? Tagesschau.de, April 16, 2016.
  6. ↑ a b c The one-man business reports from Syria - The most important source for news about the Syria conflict is a man in London with a telephone and internet connection ( memento from September 30, 2014 on WebCite ) , derStandard.at, 15 May 2012, by Michaela Kampl.
  7. ↑ a b c The Syrian Observatory: The Inside Story ( Memento from September 30, 2014 on WebCite ) (English). Al Akhbar, Jan. 26, 2012 by Asa Winstanley.
  8. ↑ Sharmine Narwani: Questioning the Syrian “Casualty List” . Al Akhbar English, February 28, 2012.
  9. ↑ Russia Doubts Credibility of London-based Syria Watchdog . Ria Novosti, accessed July 22, 2012.
  10. ↑ About Us ( Memento of 30 September 2014 Webcite ) syriahr.com.
  11. ↑ Rezo clears the Nannen Prize with the “Destruction of the CDU” from ›Meedia. Retrieved May 14, 2020 .