Days ago, a number of Syrian lawyers published a petition calling for immediate elections in the Syrian Bar Association in order to ensure the role of the law profession, along with the judiciary, in protecting rights. This petition, which may well be the first shot fired in a long battle to restore the role of the legal professions in Syria, is especially important from three angles:

Firstly, the petition emphasizes that the recovery of Syria’s “wounded society” requires not just liberation from the despotic regime but also the restoration of protective social structures, especially the Bar Association as an institution that ensures the independence of lawyers and, therefore, that they can perform their roles. Here lies the importance of the signatories’ insistence on electing their representatives in the Bar Association and its branches today, not tomorrow, and rejecting the appointments that the new authority has unilaterally made.

Emphasizing the importance of the Bar Association’s role in confronting despotism, the petition mentions the opposition of its leaders and members in the 1970s and early 1980s to the state of emergency, arbitrary arrests, and torture, which went as far as announcing a general strike to protest the regime’s excesses. The text also recalls the repressive measures that were taken against the Bar Association and ultimately suppressed its role, which included breaking down its doors, arresting its president, dissolving its general assembly and persecuting the members, dissolving its branch councils, and replacing its laws with another law guaranteeing the regime’s total control over it. As a result of this repression, the petition explains, the Bar Association not only lost its role in protecting lawyers and their independence and immunity but also transformed into a tool in the regime’s hands for monitoring and perpetually threatening them. Hence, the petition aims to mobilize lawyers to unify their voices and demand back their association, which despotism stole from them, so that the law profession does not go from one form of despotism to another or “from one master to another”, in the petitioners’ own words. At its core, this call transcends the Bar Association: it constitutes a general call to the free professions and citizenry to unite and reclaim all their social structures as bastions against any future despotism.

Building and entrenching democracy cannot occur in a top-down manner. Rather, it requires the broadest possible participation from citizens throughout the state on equal footing and with no exception or marginalization.

Secondly, the petition emphasizes the law profession’s function of “defending the rights of individuals and the existence of society, even against those in power”. While it highlights lawyers’ activism against the excesses of the 1970s and early 1980s (as mentioned earlier), it also goes as far as to state that the regime’s success in asserting its control over the Bar Association – whereupon the political authority could operate free of any legal checks – is what paved the way for the establishment of the major detention centers, most notably Tadmor Prison and Sednaya Prison.

In this regard, it is very telling that the petition not only stresses lawyers’ role in defending the “rights of individuals” (i.e. the profession’s traditional role) but also states that this role is, in the Syrian case, closely connected to another vital role, namely defending the “existence of society”. Thus, the petition reflects the depth of the Syrian tragedy, wherein the systematic trampling and disregard of individual rights undermined people’s trust in one another and, therefore, in society or perhaps even “the world” as a whole, to quote Hannah Arendt. These practices thereby threatened the various forms of social ties and, by extension, the existence of society. Hence, in the Syrian case, the aim of restoring the legal professions and the logic of rights is not just to liberate individuals from fear and destitution and guarantee their dignity along the lines of the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also to help reconstitute and restore the society that despotism strived to dismantle and destroy.

The petition’s introduction also points out that lawyers necessarily perform these roles in partnership with judges, although it provides no further details on this point. In this regard, the petition seems to be opening the door for the launch of another effort closely tied to the effort to reclaim the Bar Association and guarantee lawyers’ independence but aimed at reconstituting the judicial bodies and guaranteeing their independence too. This project is indisputably the greatest, and perhaps the most difficult, undertaking in any democratic transition process – a process that Syria’s social forces will hopefully succeed in imposing as it is essential for escaping the spiral of despotism and autocracy.

Thirdly, the petition’s signatories stress the importance of holding free Bar Association elections “today rather than tomorrow” while declaring that they reject the mechanism of appointment, even if the appointments occur under the guise of ensuring that the most competent person takes the position. This stance suggests that it is not the identity of the people that the new authority has appointed or might appoint that worries the signatories (as also evidenced by the petition’s abstention from any discussion of their competence and its support for elections irrespective of the competence of the winners). Rather, the signatories are primarily concerned about the ease with which the new authority resorted to the appointment mechanism in the absence of any controls and without making any commitment to specific election deadlines or even any assurance that this mechanism is a temporary, exceptional measure that will expire once certain other measures are promptly taken (such as suspending the legal provisions that the former regime introduced to extend its influence over the Bar Association, as the petition specifically demands). From this angle, the petition aims, in addition to mobilizing lawyers to reclaim their Bar Association, to register firm opposition to the appointment mechanism that, if it does not manage to reverse it, at least thwarts any attempt to normalize it.

In this regard too, the petition’s importance transcends the Bar Association to encompass the entire public sphere. This is because there are fears that the new authority will use unilateral appointments to assert full control over the state’s institutions and social structures while delaying general elections indefinitely, all in the absence of any clear and transparent process.

Finally, the Legal Agenda appreciates the efforts of the petition’s organizers and wishes them and Syria success in establishing a democratic transition process. We are opening our pages to any discussion or initiative aimed at strengthening the roles of the legal professions in the Syria of tomorrow, as part of our vision and efforts to consolidate the independence of the law profession and judiciary in the Arab region.

To Read The petition

This statement is an edited translation from Arabic.