syria-un-20160203 16

A/HRC/31/CRP.1 16 Violations of international humanitarian law 87. When committed after the start of the non-international armed conflict, the violations above constitute breaches of applicable international humanitarian law, including Article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits murder, summary executions, mutilation, torture, rape, outrages upon personal dignity and other inhuman treatment. International criminal law 88. Through its widespread conduct of mass arrests, arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearance, victimising the general civilian population living in restive areas and persons otherwise perceived to be in opposition to the Government, and the ensuing ill treatment and killing of those detained, Government forces have engaged in the multiple commissions of crimes, amounting to a systematic and widespread attack against a civilian population. In the context of the armed conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic, the number of civilians targeted with arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance and subsequent violations, in contravention of international humanitarian law and without any lawful military justification, suggests that the civilian population as such is the primary object of that attack. 89. The acts were committed in pursuance of a policy to target civilians broadly perceived as associated with the opposition, evidenced by the systematic occurrence of crimes across geographic areas. The existence of a State policy is further demonstrated by the fact that significant State resources were employed in the commission of the crimes and the way in which numerous State institutions throughout the country actively participated and coordinated operations at various levels of the sequential conduct, during which custodial deaths and other crimes occurred. Military and civilian courts consistently failed to order investigations into cases where detainees appearing before a judge were visibly ill-treated, sometimes displaying severe injuries, and in cases of deaths in custody. 90. The role of State institutions, namely the intelligence agencies and armed forces, and their leadership in actively executing mass arrests, transfers of detainees, their ill treatment and torture, and subsequent issuance of death certificates to misrepresent the circumstances of death in an effort to conceal detainee abuse, demonstrate the existence of State policy and commonality of criminal purpose. 91. Guards of each detention facility were often made aware of prisoners in critically ill health, yet mostly failed to provide or request medical assistance. Guards removed the bodies of deceased prisoners from the cells on a regular basis, and deaths were reported to the Head of the branch. This demonstrates that staff and commanders were aware of the numbers of deaths caused by the prison conditions inflicted on the prison population. 92. Prison conditions were largely consistent over the course of four and a half years across multiple detention facilities, and were allowed to continue without superiors taking effective action to prevent their consequences. The high number of killings, as well as other deaths occurring in the ordinary course of events following torture, poor prison conditions or from medical neglect, must also have been known to those exercising effective control and responsibility over the detention facilities. However, between 2011 and 2015, the treatment of detainees and prison conditions remained unchanged in most detention facilities, and in some cases have worsened since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, causing more detainees to die. 93. Information suggests that deaths of detainees were meticulously reported up the chain of command in several detention facilities of intelligence directorates, and that the superiors of the detention facilities and intelligence directorates were aware of the deaths occurring. Information on those that died was also conveyed to the Military Police, wh