DAMASCUS/BEIRUT, 22 April 2007 — More than 400 students whose families come from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights held a protest in Damascus yesterday over the “inhuman” conditions in which fellow Syrians are being held in Israel.

“Freedom for the prisoners,” read banners raised by the demonstrators, who gathered in front of the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross. A student group charged that most of the Syrians from the Golan Heights being held in Israel “suffer from chronic illnesses because of the inhuman conditions of their incarceration.”

Four of the 15 Syrians being held in Israel have served more than 22 years, the Golan Students League said. “Sodki Makt, Sitan Wali, Basher Makt and Assem Abdel Wali are being held in individual cells and deprived of family visits, even as their health deteriorates badly,” it said.

More than 18,000 Syrians, most of them Druze, live on the Golan Heights, which Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981. The vast majority of them have refused to take Israeli nationality.

Meanwhile, the United Nations will push through an international court to try suspects in the murder of former Lebanese Premier Rafik Hariri if the political deadlock in Beirut continues, the UN’s top legal adviser warned in comments published in Beirut yesterday.

“If the statutes of the tribunal laid out in the accord between the United Nations and the Lebanese government are not ratified in accordance with Lebanese constitutional procedures, other ways will have to be found,” Nicolas Michel told the Lebanese dailies An-Nahar and As-Safir.

“In such a case I would see no other legal solution than recourse to Chapter Seven,” he said.

This would mean imposing UN Security Council resolutions and obliging states to accept and apply them. “But that would definitely not be under Article 42 which authorizes the use of force to impose resolutions, but under Article 41” which makes no reference to the use of force, Michel added.

“Anyway, the UN commission of inquiry was created under Article 41, which means all member states must cooperate with it.”