Razan Zeitouneh one year missing
Syria
Since human rights lawyer Razan Zeitouneh, her husband and two colleagues were abducted on 9 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. Today, exactly one year after their disappearance, fifty-seven organizations, Lawyers for Lawyers among them, have urged those in power in a public joint statement to release them immediately.
Razan Zaitouneh has been one of the key lawyers defending political prisoners in Syria since 2001. Since the beginning of the crisis in 2011, Razan Zaitouneh has played a key role in efforts to defend human rights for all and protect independent groups and activists in Syria. Razan Zeitouneh is co-founder of the Local Coordination Committees in Syria (LCC) and the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), which documents all human rights violations in Syria. Furthermore, she is co-founder of the ‘local development and small projects support office’ (LDSPS), which provices basic needs and essential services and support to medical and development centres in Syria.
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.