The Assad regime may have collapsed, but several of its most repressive legal instruments continue to cast a long shadow over public life. Foremost among them is Cybercrime Law No. 20 of 2022, a statute crafted in the regime’s final years to police the digital sphere through sweeping, ambiguous charges such as “undermining the prestige of the state” or “harming its financial standing.”
The paradox is stark. A transitional government that claims to be dismantling the machinery of authoritarianism has neither suspended the law nor initiated a review of its most dangerous provisions. Instead, its continued enforcement—alongside documented detentions of activists and content creators—raises an uncomfortable question: Is the new authority using a law designed by the fallen regime to shield itself from criticism?
Legally, one could argue that existing statutes remain in force until amended or repealed. But this logic collapses in a transitional context meant to break decisively with the tools of repression. Cybercrime Law No. 20 was never a neutral framework for combating hacking or online fraud. Its elastic, politically charged language was engineered to convert public opinion, journalistic scrutiny, and social-media commentary into prosecutable offenses.
This is the heart of the matter. A democratic state does not need a law to protect itself from its citizens’ speech; it needs a law to protect citizens from genuine digital crimes. There is a profound difference between prosecuting those who steal data or blackmail people online, and prosecuting those who criticize officials, challenge policies, or expose corruption. The former is a legitimate state function. The latter is the continuation of authoritarianism by legal means.
Rebuilding the Climate of Fear
Keeping the law intact sends a deeply troubling message. While files on torture, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and systemic corruption remain unresolved, the rapid deployment of the cybercrime law against dissenters suggests that the state is far quicker to prosecute words than to pursue perpetrators of grave abuses. This risks reconstructing the very climate of fear Syrians endured for decades.
The danger of vague statutes is their refusal to define a crime with precision. What constitutes “insulting the state”? Where does “undermining its prestige” begin? And who decides whether a post targets the state as an institution or merely criticises an official or policy?
When legality is left deliberately undefined, citizens choose silence—not because they have committed a crime, but because they cannot predict when ordinary speech will be criminalized.
This dynamic runs counter to the very purpose of a transitional phase. Freedom of opinion and expression is not a luxury in rebuilding a post-authoritarian state; it is a foundational pillar of political legitimacy. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) guarantees the right to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information. Any restriction must meet strict tests of necessity and proportionality—standards the current law fails to meet.
The Way Forward: Reform, Not Repression
The solution is not to abolish the concept of a cybercrime law. Syria genuinely needs modern legislation to confront hacking, digital fraud, blackmail, identity theft, and privacy violations. What is urgently required is the complete decriminalization of political opinion, journalistic critique, and public debate.
This must include:
- Ending pre-trial detention in expression-related cases
- Tightening judicial oversight over any prosecution involving speech
- Penalizing malicious or politically motivated complaints
But the issue extends beyond a single statute. If the new government continues to wield Assad-era laws to insulate itself from criticism, it risks reproducing one of the most dangerous traits of the former dictatorship: transforming the law from a shield for rights into a weapon for policing the public sphere.
A state built on citizenship and institutional legitimacy cannot rely on tools designed to suffocate the public square. A genuine transition requires an immediate freeze on all liberty-restricting clauses within the cybercrime law, followed by a comprehensive legislative overhaul that clearly distinguishes between combating real digital crime and criminalizing political expression.
Without such reforms, one question will continue to haunt the new era: How can Syria claim to be “new” while the laws of the old regime still govern the boundaries of speech?
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
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