A/HRC/35/15 Republic had been and continued to be arguably the best documented war ever, largely thanks to the work of brave activists and citizen journalists. 16. In preparing for the panel, Ms. Damon had searched through her footage from 2011 for anything, any story that might have changed the course of the war, but found nothing. One of the first stories she had covered in Syrian Arab Republic was that of a woman in Damascus documenting human rights violations who had said that it was her responsibility to make the country better. Because of her work, the woman had been detained for 48 hours before being released thanks to her family’s connections. Those 48 hours were enough for her to conclude that “they do not treat prisoners like human beings”. 17. Ms. Damon added that other people she later interviewed had asked her: “Have you ever been in a situation where you wished you were dead? Where death would be a greater mercy than the pain inflicted on you?” Survivors had described torture techniques that epitomized how vile humans could be and that included forcing people into a tire while beating or burning the soles of their feet, hanging people until their arms were ripped from their sockets, inflicting electrocutions and carrying out rapes that sometimes involved sodomy. Many of those who had survived detention were ghosts of what they had once been and needed support. Ms. Damon said she had interviewed countless people who had not known where their loved ones were, had assumed they were dead, yet had painfully clung to the hope that they might still be alive. She spoke of a woman she had met in Greece who had spent years trawling detention facilities, looking for her husband in vain; she had eventually given up and decided to take the route to Europe with her daughters. 18. Ms. Damon said that the size and scale of the detention issue in the Syrian Arab Republic was arguably unprecedented in modern history. A lot of responsibility lay with the Government and its backers, but most of the players’ hands were drenched in blood and what was perhaps more chilling was that the international community had not even begun to scratch the surface of the crimes committed in the Syrian Arab Republic. She noted that the most recent report of Amnesty International on mass hangings in Sadnaya prison was but the latest example. She ended by emphasizing that the families of the missing needed the support of the international community, and that there needed to be accountability for violations of international human rights law. Concrete steps were required to show Syrians that the international community would not continue to fail them. The tragedy of the Syrian Arab Republic was that the international community knew, but did nothing. She saluted the panellists for having the courage not to be silenced. 19. In his intervention, Mr. Abdul Ghani recalled the sixth anniversary of the popular action for democracy and change in the Syrian Arab Republic and noted that 106,000 persons were still being detained, 92,000 of whom by the Government. Of those detained, 80 per cent had been made to disappear. Some 13,100 persons had died as a result of torture. That data had been gathered over six years thanks to daily, meticulous work and despite unprecedented challenges, including insecurity and the risk of being arrested. Torture was systematic and many deaths in detention had resulted from poor conditions or the lack of medical care, as highlighted by the Commission of Inquiry in its report “Out of sight, out of mind: deaths in detention in the Syrian Arab Republic”, issued in 2016. Mr. Abdul Ghani noted that his organization had documented some 46 torture techniques and continued to document cases on a monthly basis. Other parties, such as the Al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusrah, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), armed opposition groups and ISIL, had started replicating those techniques. According to Mr. Abdul Ghani, Jabhat al-Nusrah was holding 1,600 people in captivity, ISIL 7,400, armed opposition groups 2,600 and YPG 2,100. 20. Mr. Abdul Ghani highlighted that detention could not be tackled without addressing the entire conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic. He noted that, despite the Astana ceasefire agreement, casualties continued to be documented, with 780 people killed in January and 876 in February. Cases of arbitrary arrest and torture continued, with 390 such cases recorded by the Syrian Network for Human Rights in January and 720 in February. International human rights law and international humanitarian law had been completely flouted and marginalized, and while three resolutions on detention in the Syrian Arab Republic had been adopted there had been no progress on the issue. 5