Since human rights lawyer Razan Zaitouneh, her husband and two colleagues were abducted on 9 December 2013, no one has heard of them. Today, exactly three years after their disappearance, fifty-six organizations, Lawyers for Lawyers amongst them, called for their immediate release.
Razan Zeitouneh, Wa’el Hamada, Samira Khalil, and Nazem Hammadi disappeared in Douma, after group of armed men stormed into the office of the Violations Documentation Center (VDC) on 9 December 2013.
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 human rights violations in Syria. As a result of her work, she had been threatened by both the Syrian government and armed opposition groups in Douma several months before her abduction.
