Founded May 2006 (2006-05) Legal status Non profit Location Coventry, UK | Type NGO Focus Human rights activism | |
Founder Osama Suleiman (Rami Abdulrahman) | ||
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (also known as SOHR; Arabic: المرصد السوري لحقوق الإنسان), founded in May 2006, is a UK-based information office that has been documenting human rights abuses in Syria; it has focused since 2011 on the Syrian Civil War. It is frequently quoted by major Western news media, such as Voice of America, Reuters, BBC, CNN and National Public Radio, since the beginning of the uprising about daily numbers of deaths from all sides in the conflict and civilians killed in airstrikes in Syria. SOHR has been described as being "pro-opposition" and anti-Assad.
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Organisation
The organisation is run by Rami Abdulrahman (sometimes referred to as Rami Abdul Rahman), from his home in Coventry. He is a Syrian Sunni Muslim who owns a clothes shop. Born Osama Suleiman, he adopted a pseudonym during his years of activism in Syria, and has used it publicly ever since. After being imprisoned three times in Syria, Abdulrahman fled to the United Kingdom fearing a fourth jail term and has not returned.
In a December 2011 interview with Reuters, Abdulrahman said the observatory has a network of more than 200 people and that six of his sources had been killed. In 2012, Süddeutsche Zeitung described the organization as a one-man-operation with a single permanent worker, Rami Abdulrahman. In April 2013, the New York Times described him as being on the phone all day every day with contacts in Syria, relying on four men inside the country who collate information from more than 230 activists while cross-checking all information with sources himself.
Praise and criticism
The United Nations, newspapers, and nongovernmental organisations say that SOHR is an accurate source. "Generally, the information on the killings of civilians is very good, definitely one of the best, including the details on the conditions in which people were supposedly killed," said Neil Sammonds, a researcher for Amnesty International.
SOHR has been accused of selective reporting, with AsiaNews saying that they covered only violent acts of the government forces against the opposition for the first two years of its existence. SOHR has also been accused of reporting militant anti-government fighters among dead civilians, and has been described as being "pro-opposition" and anti-Assad. It has been criticised for refusing to share its raw data or methodology. In October 2015, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova questioned the reliability of the organization saying that it is based in London and has no ground access to Syria. In March 2017, German Foreign Office spokesman Sebastian Fischer criticized the credibility of the organization and called its findings "unsubstantial" after SOHR reported that a coalition airstrike carried out on intelligence from Germany caused civilian casualties. He went on to say that it is crucial to "take into account that those, who give specific information over to them [the SOHR], have their own interests consisting of this information being presented to the public in a particular way."