To mark the 38th birthday of missing human rights defender and lawyer Razan Zaitouneh, 70 organizations, including Lawyers for Lawyers, today reiterate their call for her immediate release, as well as that of her missing colleagues Samira Khalil, Nazem Hamadi and Wa’el Hamada. The four were abducted on 9 December 2013 in Douma. Since then, no one has heard of them.
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. She 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, Zaitouneh 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.
See the full statement here.
