DAMASCUS: Two political activists have been sentenced to jail in Syria, where the government has been clamping down on dissent in recent weeks, human rights lawyers said yesterday.

The State Security Court sentenced Islamist politician Abdul Satar Qatan to 12 years on Sunday on charges of belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, his lawyers said.

The court, whose judgement cannot be appealed, sentenced Riad Darar, an activist sympathetic to the Kurdish minority, to five years of hard labour for causing sectarian tensions, his lawyer said.

In recent weeks, the government has arrested students, detained opposition leaders and violently broken up demonstrations against a lack of political freedoms, the human rights lawyers said.

Qatan has spent 19 years in Syrian jails as a political prisoner. Darar was arrested last year after giving a speech in northeast Syria at the funeral of Kurdish cleric Mohamed al-Khaznawi, who died in mysterious circumstances.

The Kurdish minority, emboldened by the ascendancy of Kurds in Iraq, has been demanding political and citizenship rights.

Darar’s lawyer Khalil Matouk said: “My client made a speech that called for national unity and condemned repression; the authorities saw it as a sign of unity between Arab and Kurdish opposition, which represented a threat.”

Matouk said Darar was exercising his freedom of expression and said “this illegal security court must be abolished”.

No comment was immediately available from the authorities. – Reuters