Qunfuz

This article was first published at the excellent Syrian platform Al Jumhuriya.

On 17 June, Syrian content creator Hassan Akkad was arrested in a Damascus café by armed men, as if he were an immediate danger to the public. In reality, he was only an irritant to the few powerful people he was holding to account in his YouTube videos for failing to pay what they’d promised to rebuilding campaigns. His arrest made big waves in Syrian society – however, other less high-profile arrests have not gained as much attention.

In Akkad’s case, as in others, the authorities are maintaining the Assad-era Law No. 20 of 2022, a Cybercrime Law which criminalises ‘defamation’ and ‘slander’, and using it against Syrians who criticise the powerful or wealthy. Hassan Akkad was accused of defamation by Mousa al-Omar, a pro-government media celebrity, and by companies controlled by Muhammad Hamsho, a former financier of the Assad regime who has come to an agreement with the new government.

Fortunately for him, Hassan Akkad is a well-known and respected figure, and international journalists were among those who joined a wide range of Syrians in publicly objecting to his detention. This pressure led to his release after four days. Yet, rather than ending the episode by repealing, suspending or reforming the Cybercrime Law as some had demanded, the Ministry of Information actually increased restrictions. Six new prohibited categories include ‘violations of public decency’ and ‘attacks on institutional reputations.’

These categories are wide open to interpretation, and they will have a chilling effect on discourse: they signal that any online criticism of a state institution or official could potentially be considered defamation. According to Fadel Abdulghany of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the “mere existence” of these “vague penal texts” and “the possibility of their use is enough to drive individuals, journalists, and content creators into a pre-emptive silence, in a way that threatens the very possibility that a free public space might arise during the transitional phase.”

Akkad was by no means the first to be arrested on such questionable grounds. On 2 June, just a couple of weeks earlier, Yasser Abbas and Ibrahim Sheikh al-Shabab were detained for ‘defamation’ of authorities including Damascus Governor Maher al-Idlibi. Their actual ‘crime’ had been to campaign openly and peacefully against Marota City, an Assad-era luxury construction project in western Damascus that has entailed mass evictions of poor residents. As with Akkad, community pressure won the men’s rapid release. The authorities, however, did not drop charges against them; they will be tried in September.

A year before, in May 2025, the activist Ahmad Fakhr al-Din was arrested in Nabk for similarly spurious reasons. Fakhr al-Din’s Facebook page “Behind the Scenes in Nabk” had posted a video showing General Security operatives engaged in abuses. Though documenting abuses and holding officials to account are basic activities of the citizen journalism that proliferated during the now-officially-celebrated revolution, Fakhr al-Din’s truth-telling was considered to be “undermining state authority.” Once again, the victim’s popularity helped him. Locals immediately organized protests, people made formal complaints and expressed outrage on social media, and Fakhr al-Din was released within a few days.

But not everybody can count on such levels of public support – or even if they can, very powerful countervailing interests may cancel the impact of that support. The Emirati citizen Jasim al-Shamsi is a case in point. One of 133 Emirati intellectuals and public figures who signed a 2011 petition calling for democratic reforms in the UAE, al-Shamsi soon had to flee his home to avoid arrest. In January 2013 he and others were tried in absentia, charged with setting up a secret subversive organization. In December 2023, he was tried again on counter-terrorism charges, and this time sentenced to life imprisonment.