The new platform, Athar, was launched on the same day as the International Day of Victims of Enforced Disappearances, promising to assist families.
Syria’s National Commission for Missing Persons on Sunday launched a new platform to collect data on individuals who are unaccounted for, in a bid to help determine their fate and assist their families.
The platform, named Athar, was launched to coincide with the International Day of Victims of Enforced Disappearances, and will allow families and relatives to submit reports about their missing relatives and register their own information on the website.
The development comes as thousands of families in Syria are still searching for their loved ones who were lost or forcibly disappeared by the ousted Assad regime or other parties involved in the Syrian conflict.
In a statement on Sunday, the National Commission for Missing Persons said the new initiative marks “a step in its efforts to build a unified national registry for individuals and to document reports in an organised and secure manner”.
The commission said the platform will help support the search for missing people and determine their fate, in a bid to help families know the fate of their loved ones.
The platform has been rolled out on a provisional basis across several governorates and regions in the country, before it is permanently launched.
The commission has also assigned technical assistance members across governorates to help answer any inquiries from families and help them create accounts and register reports.
In the coming months, the commission will also launch field centres in 13 governorates and in Damascus, to assist families who face difficulties accessing electronic platforms.
Authorities have called on people to share sensitive information about missing people only through officially approved channels, to avoid unreliable links or entities, and to protect their data and privacy.
Syrian lawyer Mahmoud al-Moussa told The New Arab that the new Athar platform marks “a shift from scattered initiatives and reports to a unified institutional approach,” noting that “collecting data within a national registry can help in the future with searching, tracking, and operations and will give relevant authorities a more accurate picture of the scale of this issue”.
The next phase of the platform is set to expand on the reports filed there, verify information, and launch search operations.
Earlier this week, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said in its annual report that at least 177,000 people, including 4,536 children and 8,984 women are still forcibly disappeared since March 2011.
The majority are believed to be dead.
SNHR said that there have been at least 45,365 deaths related to torture or inhuman detention conditions since 2011, and that the figures given “represent the minimum number of cases we were able to document, and that actual numbers are likely much higher”.
The rights group added that families of the forcibly disappeared have the right to know the circumstances of their disappearance, saying that many families were suffering psychological, social, and economic hardship as a result of not knowing the fate of their loved ones.
Many families have not been able to hold funerals, obtain death certificates, settle inheritance issues or handle legal matters due to the lack of information on their missing family members.
Fadel Abdul Ghani, the head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, called on the Syrian government to make the issue a priority.
“The search for the missing cannot be separated from justice, because every case raises questions about who carried out the arrest, who issued the orders, and what happened to the victim,” he said.
