Abstract
While many of Syria’s political prisoners were released after the fall of Assad, those who fled to Lebanon during his regime remain in overcrowded jails.
WHEN HE WAS in his twenties, Salem (not his real name) was arrested twice in Lebanon. The first time was in 2023 when he was detained for seven months, then released for lack of evidence. In mid-2024 he was arrested again, and he remains in the notoriously overcrowded Roumieh Prison, near Beirut.
Relatives of inmates at Roumieh Prison clash with police officers and security forces in 2011 after a series of protests
Salem spoke to Index via WhatsApp message, using a mobile phone he keeps carefully hidden. “My crime was that I was a journalist covering the massive violations committed against Syrian asylum seekers in Lebanon,” he said. “This irritated the Lebanese authorities.”
Rampant violence and discrimination towards Syrians in Lebanon have been widely reported, reaching a climax in early 2024 when international and local NGOs circulated information that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Directorate of General Security (GSO) had resumed raids and deportations against Syrian refugee communities.
Salem was slapped with false accusations, he said, and he asked his father to hire a lawyer if his detention exceeded 10 days. “I was prepared to spend the rest of my life in a Lebanese prison, rather than be handed over to the Assad regime.”
But in early December last year, when the Assad dynasty’s 54-year stranglehold on Syria collapsed during a major offensive by opposition forces, Salem thought he would be released.
Hundreds of Syrians have been held in Roumieh Prison, some for more than 10 years, mostly on charges of opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Detained without trial for political reasons, many suffer poor nutrition and no medical care, as Lebanon endures an intractable economic crisis.
Smoke rises from Beirut’s Roumieh Prison in April 2011 after a series of riots and fires. Relatives of the inmates protested outside the prison against lengthy detentions without trial, and poor conditions
CREDIT: Imago / Xinhua / Koka / Alamy
According to the Lebanese Prisoners’ Rights Observatory, approximately 2,000 Syrians are currently held in Lebanon, almost 30% of the country’s total prisoner population. Among them are many political detainees, some of whom have been charged with belonging to terrorist organisations. The rest are held on other criminal charges, as a result of the hostile environment towards Syrian refugees and their poor treatment by Lebanese security and judicial agencies.
Since the fall of the regime, Syrian families have been calling for the release and repatriation of their relatives, most recently in a video where families appealed to the authorities on Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday in March marking the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported that Lebanon is prepared to hand over up to 700 Syrian prisoners to the interim Syrian government once the “necessary legal procedures are completed,” with no explanation as to what these processes are.
Arrested in 2014 in Arsal, 124 km northeast of Beirut, Syrian refugee Mohammed Qasim, 60, remains trapped in judicial limbo, his son Khaled told Index.
Though cleared of car bombing charges and having served his two-year sentence for documentation issues, intelligence services seized him on his release day in 2015. After being tortured, Mohammed arrived at Roumieh Prison with multiple broken bones.
Nearly a decade later, he is still awaiting trial while his case languishes in the bureaucratic shadows. His sons now living in Northern Syria cannot visit him, fearing their own arrest. They struggle to send $300 each month to cover their father’s essentials and medical needs, while justice remains elusive.
In another case, Mohammed al-Abd, 40, told Index he defected from Assad’s army in 2011, in the early days of the Syrian civil war, refusing to kill his fellow countrymen.
“I fled to Lebanon for safety,” he said in a telephone interview from Roumieh Prison. “But then I was captured by Lebanese security forces.”
Under torture, he said he was forced to confess to crimes he never committed.
“The judiciary was biased to Assad’s regime,” al-Abd said, in what he described as a “kangaroo court” which sentenced him to 15 years in prison.
He has served seven years so far, enduring what he describes as “extremely poor humanitarian conditions and severe overcrowding”.
“The false terrorism charge invented by the Assad regime should have fallen with the deposed dictator,” he said.
According to the Beirut Bar Association, Roumieh prison was designed to accommodate 1,200 prisoners, but currently houses about 4,000, leading to squalid conditions. In February, 120 Syrian detainees went on hunger strike, protesting their seemingly indefinite detention without a clear path to trial or repatriation.
Mohammad Sablouh, a Lebanese lawyer and head of the legal support programme at the Cedar Centre for Legal Studies, successfully pressured Lebanese authorities against extraditing Syrian detainees to Damascus multiple times. Now, he’s puzzled by their sudden reluctance to release them.
“Lebanon must acknowledge that it contributed to suppressing the Syrian revolution through arrests and torture of refugees,” Sablouh said.
In January 2025, protesters gathered at Umayyad Mosque in Damascus asking for the release of Syrian prisoners who have been detained in Lebanon’s Roumieh prison for more than 10 years
CREDIT: Elisa Gestri / Sipa US / Alamy
He highlighted the case of Bashar Abed Al Saoud, who Sablouh said died in 2022 after three hours under torture in the State Security Detention Centre in Tebnine, southern Lebanon. According to Sablouh, Saoud’s relatives had later been forced to confess to false charges of belonging to a terrorist organisation under torture. There was a public outcry following their case – it was subsequently re-opened by the public prosecutor, and they were declared innocent.
“This story captures the experience of hundreds of Syrian detainees in Lebanon,” explained Sablouh. “The Lebanese military judiciary dealt with them vindictively because the judges were allied to the Assad regime.”
In a particularly troubling incident in 2017, he said, the Lebanese army rounded up 356 Syrian refugees in Arsal, four of whom died under torture.
Hussam Ghanem, from Damascus, is an advocate for the rights of Syrian detainees in Lebanon. He draws motivation from his early support for the Syrian revolution and his own experience of arbitrary detention.
After fleeing attacks on his village of Zabadani in 2015 by the Lebanese armed Shia group Hezbollah allied with Assad, Ghanem cared for wounded Syrians in Lebanon, which he says prompted his arrest.
“I spent three years in detention without trial before being found innocent and released, only to be detained again on other trumped-up charges,” he said. He eventually escaped to Turkey.
Ghanem noted the irony in Lebanon’s shifting stance.
“Before Assad’s fall, Prime Minister [Najib] Mikati asked Syria [to] request the repatriation of Syrian prisoners to ease the overcrowding, but Syria refused. Now Lebanon is clinging on to these detainees as a political bargaining chip.”
Despite recent diplomatic visits to Damascus by both former Prime Minister Mikati and current Prime Minister Nawaf Salam specifically addressing the issue of detainees, there has been no progress.
Sablouh believes Syria’s new leadership genuinely wants to resolve the detainee issue, but that Lebanon must take action.
Working with the National Bloc, a Lebanese secular party which wants to build a citizenship-based nation through practical political reforms, Sablouh proposed legislation to address detainee rights while reducing prison overcrowding.
“It’s time to think about real transitional justice away from narrow interests,” he said, noting that his draft law would help release Syrian political prisoners while supporting the Lebanese people who backed the Syrian revolution.
Syrian lawyer Ihab Abdrabbo, however, identifies both legal and political barriers to the release of Syrian prisoners.
“These detainees were tried before the Lebanese judiciary,” he explained, which makes unconditional release difficult under Lebanese law.
Given Hezbollah’s influence and the serious nature of the charges, he said, “it will be difficult for a Lebanese judge to bear the responsibility of releasing them.”
Abdrabbo believes that the only other alternative is for the authorities in Syria and Lebanon to reach a political solution, either through a general pardon or special amnesty.
He advocates for detainees to be retried after release, citing what he calls Hezbollah’s “corrupting influence on Lebanon’s judiciary” and extensive torture documentation.
He also believes Syria’s government should provide diplomatic representation or legal aid for its detainees in Lebanon.
Ghanem emphasised the unaffordability of Lebanese legal counsel for the families of these detainees, condemning the system of court-appointed “contrarian” lawyers who actively undermine their defendants.
“In the meantime, human rights advocates must continue to mobilise protests at the Syrian-Lebanese border, Damascus parliament, and the Syrian embassy in Beirut to amplify detainees’ voices internationally,” Ghanem said.
“We must expose the profound injustice these detainees suffer to the world.”