Syria’s emergency law enshrines the autocratic nature of the Assad dynasty’s rule. It restricts public gatherings and the free movement of individuals, it allows government agents to arrest “suspects or people who threaten security,” it authorizes the monitoring of personal communications and it legalizes media censorship. It has been in place since the 1963 coup d’tat that brought the Baath Party to power. That plot was instigated in part by Hafez al-Assad, the previous President and father of the current one. Indeed, as some observers have noted, the emergency law is older than President Bashar al-Assad himself.
But, suddenly, as Syria experiences the onslaught of the Arab Spring, the emergency law is becoming the regime’s sacrificial lamb. Just days after announcing that a committee would be formed to study lifting the nearly half-century-old law, Syria’s presidential adviser Buthaina Shaaban told several foreign journalists on Sunday that the measure would “absolutely” be repealed. She did not, however, say when that would happen.
The lightning decision appears to have been made without benefit of committee or recommendations — the regime’s usual apparatus for watering down or ultimately rejecting reforms. Indeed, a proposal to review the emergency law that was put almost routinely forward just a month ago was unanimously rejected by Syria’s rubber-stamp parliament, according to Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian dissident based in Washington, D.C., and visiting scholar at the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University.
All this takes place as the emergency law appears to have lost some of its teeth. On Friday, people in at least a dozen cities staged mass demonstrations demanding freedoms and reform, prompting a brutal security crackdown that left dozens of protesters dead. The demonstrations took place despite the emergency law’s prohibition of such gatherings — and may indicate that, at least for now, large sections of the populace no longer feel cowed by the law. Perhaps to ameliorate public rancor, the regime also reportedly released some 260 political prisoners on Friday night from Saydnaya prison. Most had served the majority of their sentences.
