syria-un-20140112 1

Ministerial meeting on Syria - Paris Declaration of the Core Group, Paris, January 12, 2014 We, the Foreign Ministers of Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States, met today in Paris with a delegation of the Syrian National Coalition led by its president Ahmad al-Jarba, and adopted the following Core Group declaration: 1. We support the rights of the Syrian people to determine its own destiny and to defend itself against oppression. The Geneva II Conference, based on the full implementation of the Geneva Communiqué, is aiming at allowing the Syrian people to control its future and put an end to the current despotic regime through a genuine political transition. 2. We condemn in the strongest terms the atrocities committed on a daily basis by the regime against its own people, with the support of Hezbollah and other foreign groups. We express outrage notably at the intensive use of “barrel bombs” against the population of the city of Aleppo, which have left over 700 dead and 3,000 injured since December 15, and in several other locations throughout Syria. We are revolted by the “starve or surrender” strategy used by the regime, which in particular deprives of food and medicine more than 200,000people in the suburbs of Damascus and in the old city of Homs. We recall that any strategy to starve civilians constitutes a war crime. The international community should not be expected to tolerate the continuation of such crimes. 3. The increased fuelling, by the regime, of the suffering of the Syrian people gravely undermines the prospect of success of the Geneva II Conference. The regime must fulfill its obligations set out by UN Security Council Resolutions 2042 and 2043 which it formally accepted and, in particular, must immediately put an end to its indiscriminate attacks against civilians and release all arbitrarily detained persons. It must allow immediate and unfettered humanitarian access to the entirety of the Syrian territory, through cross line and cross border operations. We urge Russia and Iran to use all their influence on the regime to act accordingly. We deplore that the UN Security Council could not express itself since the 2 October Presidential Statement. Considering that the situation is still deteriorating, we call for a humanitarian resolution from the UN Security Council. 4. We reiterate our conviction that the only solution to the conflict is a genuine political transition, based on the full implementation of the Geneva Communiqué, and preserving the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian State. 5. We welcome the invitation sent by the UN Secretary General, which convenes the parties to a Geneva II Conference to fully implement the Geneva Communiqué, with the priority aim of forming, by mutual consent, a transitional governing body (TGB) with full executive powers. We recall that the invitation clearly states that participating in the Conference will be taken as a commitment to this aim. 6. We therefore strongly condemn the latest statements of the regime, by which it refused to come to Geneva to establish a political transition. These statements fully contradict the Geneva Communiqué, endorsed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2118, to which the regime must commit. In addition, the perspective of a presidential election organized by the regime, in which Bashar al-Assa