I listened to Ms. Shaaban reading out a government statement at a press conference.

Other than announcing a paltry increase in salaries, the government’s statement contains little else but more promises of what the authorities would like to do in the future.

After fifty years of totalitarian dictatorship regime, it is time to take critical decisions.  We do not hear, in the statement read by Ms. Shaaban, any talk about the abolition of Law 49 of 1980. This law contradicts the Constitution and the Penal Code, and was established to commit massacres. Nor do we hear anything about repealing Article 16 of Decree 14 of 1969, which protects officers in the organs of the state security from any legal liability when committing crimes.

We also hear not a word about the closure of outstanding issues since the reign of the late President Hafez al-Assad in the eighties of the last century. Nothing about the cases of those disappeared since the events of Hama, Aleppo and Palmyra; the issue of thousands of properties’ confiscated; and the problem of exiled Syrians outside Syria who are barred from returning to it.

The situation in Syria requires the President himself to appear on the screen of the television and to address the people clearly and transparently with a speech that provides them with decisions addressing their pressing demands. These are: lifting the state of emergency, and to submit quickly to the Parliament constitutional amendments, which should include the abolition of Article VIII, and the repeal of all laws in contradiction of the constitution, as the ones I mentioned earlier.

The circumstances which our country faces require all of us, those who are in power and those who are in the opposition, not to resort to provocation and to the use of thuggery, not to incite ethnic or sectarian division. Here I urge everyone to be disciplined both in the case of those demanding reforms and in the case of those in the authorities attempting to rein over the protesters. We are in a decisive moment, a moment that could calm the situation or make it explode. Hence there is heavy responsibility on the authorities for the enforcement of critical resolutions to restore its credibility before the citizens.

We ask God to guide our steps all for the good of the country and people until we meet again.

Lawyer Haitham Maleh                                                       Damascus, March 26th, 2011