A/HRC/35/15 21. In conclusion, Mr. Abdul Ghani stated that, despite the situation, some achievements could be made. Imposing harsher sanctions on States sponsoring the Syrian regime would have a significant effect. 22. Ms. Seif explained how her life and that of her family had been affected by arbitrary arrests and detention. In 1980, her uncle had disappeared after being snatched by security forces from his bed in front of his mother, his wife and his 1-year-old daughter Nour. The life of the family had been one of waiting. In the meantime, Ms. Seif’s grandmother had passed away. Nour had only learned of her father’s fate when she turned 20, when a highranking officer informed her that he had been executed in Tadmor prison many years earlier. In August 1996, Nour’s brother, who was 21, disappeared and his whereabouts remained unknown. Ms. Seif’s father, then a member of parliament, had been working on uncovering corruption but had decided to remain silent out of fear for the security of his children. The disappearance of his son had been a clear message that he should not pursue his work against corruption. In 2001, he was detained and sentenced to five years in prison after a sham trial for calling for changes to the Constitution. He was released in 2006. During the following two years, the family was systematically harassed by security forces and summoned regularly, until he was once again detained for two years for participating in an “unauthorized meeting”. Another cousin of Ms. Seif had been arrested by the police and had disappeared for 10 days; he had been tortured and then released after the family had paid bribes. 23. Ms. Seif highlighted that her story was emblematic of how thousands of Syrian families had been affected by enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention and the torture of their loved ones. Those who had survived detention centres had described them as hell. All those crimes had been perpetrated by the Assad family — father and son — and not a single person had been held accountable for such acts. She said that the recent report of Amnesty International on executions in Sadnaya prison had been no surprise, and recalled that in 1982 the regime had massacred tens of thousands of Syrians in Hama without anyone having been held accountable. She added that, like many Syrians, she believed that if justice had been done for those crimes, the inhuman and cruel practices of detention, torture and cold-blooded executions would not have happened again and that the criminal elements from the other side claiming to be revolutionaries or opponents would not have dared to commit similar crimes. 24. Ms. Seif ended by emphasizing that it was high time to put an end to the culture of impunity in the Syrian Arab Republic. Justice was a right of all Syrians and their children. It was a condition for peace. Justice was not a means of revenge but a means to avoid revenge and to give hope for a better future, to create an atmosphere with a minimum of peace of mind. It was necessary for peaceful coexistence between Syrians. It was an invitation for Syrian refugees to return to their country and rebuild it, and it was also important for curbing radicalization and defeating terrorism. Any political track that did not address justice and accountability would not bring a sustainable peace. 25. Ms. Aljizawi described the conditions of her detention for six months at the Palestine branch, a detention centre in Damascus run by the Syrian military intelligence, and her disappearance in 2012. Hers was the story of thousands of Syrian women who had been detained, not just because they were human rights activists or had been involved in the provision of humanitarian or medical assistance, but because they were in a region whose population was perceived by the Government as belonging to the opposition. Women had been detained on the basis of their identity card. That was how dozens of women she had met had been detained. The women came from Daraya, Baba Amr, Al-Zabadani, Madayya, Al-Houla and hundreds of other villages and areas where the population had taken to the streets against the regime. Women had also been detained as a means of pressuring their families or extracting information under torture. Scores of women had reported to the NGO recently created by Ms. Aljizawi that they had been tortured in front of their husbands, brothers or parents in order to force them to confess. 26. Ms. Aljizawi spoke of detainees engraving their names on the walls of their cells with their nails. A few months after she had been detained, her sister read her name on the wall of cell number 13. Ms. Aljizawi wondered whether her daughter too would one day read her name, together with her sister’s, on that same wall. 6