FILE PHOTO: A billboard with a picture of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad shows damage by bullet holes, in Damascus, Syria, December 16, 2024. REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Syria’s constitutional declaration of March 2025 had also called for undoing the effects of what it termed unjust rulings handed down by the court, including the return of confiscated property. In 2024, the United Nations Human Rights Committee said the 2012 law that created the court had failed to provide adequate judicial guarantees, and it raised concerns over arbitrary detention, torture or ill-treatment, as well as the court’s independence. Separately, the UN’s international, impartial and independent mechanism said in a 2024 report that the counter-terrorism court had formed part of the judicial system through which people held by Assad-era security agencies could be prosecuted. Wednesday’s vote took place during the opening weeks of the first parliament to be formed since Assad’s removal from power on December 8 2024, according to Reuters.
In June 2025, President Ahmed al-Sharaa issued a decree dismissing 67 judges who had served on what he then described as the “abolished Counter-Terrorism Court”. The report documented widespread and systematic torture and ill-treatment throughout the government’s detention system. Syria’s parliament voted on Wednesday to abolish a counter-terrorism court established during the reign of former President Bashar al-Assad and nullify the legal effects of its rulings.