Syria Razan Zeitouneh missing for six months
Since human rights lawyer Razan Zeitouneh, her husband and two colleagues were abducted in December 2013 no one has heard of them. Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada, Samira Khalil, and Nazem Hammadi disappeared in Douma, a city that is under the control of an armed opposition group. On 27 May, forty-five organizations, L4L among them, have urged those in power to release them or to start investigating their disappearance.
For nearly six months Zeitouneh and her colleagues have been deprived of their freedom. A few months before her abduction, Zeitouneh had been receiving threats, which she wrote about in the online news outlet Now Lebanon. She had also informed human rights activists outside Syria in September that she was being threatened by local armed groups in Douma.
Their ongoing detention is part of a wider campaign of threats and harassment against people seeking to expose abuses by armed opposition groups in Syria. The organisations urged both government and armed opposition groups to stop arbitrarily arresting, abducting and detaining people for their peaceful, journalistic, and humanitarian activities – in line with United Nations Security Council resolution 2139, which demands the release of all arbitrarily detained people in Syria.