The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) released a report on World Refugee Day noting it had documented at least 4,714 cases where Syrian refugees and IDPs who returned to Syria had been arrested by regime forces between 2014 and June 2024.
Of the 4,714 arrested or detained, 3,532, including 251 children and 214 women were refugees returning from countries of asylum or residence to their original places of residence in Syria.
To that end, SNHR has shown in dozens of reports that returning refugees are subjected to the same violations suffered by residents in Syria, amid an absence of any credible legal environment and the predominance of “oppression, despotism, and the centralization of authority.”
The network highlighted that the forced repatriation of Syrian refugees constituted a flagrant violation of customary international law and that governments carrying out such practices bear legal responsibility for the torture, killing, enforced disappearance, and other violations potentially perpetrated by the Syrian regime against those forcibly returned.