Bashar Hafez al-Assad is the President of Syria and Regional Secretary of the Syrian-led branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. He has served as President since 2000, when he succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria for 30 years prior to his death. Al-Assa... Explore this topic

The Houla massacre was an attack that took place on May 25, 2012, in two opposition-controlled villages in the Houla Region of Syria. According to UN observers, 108 people were killed, including 25 men, 34 women, and 49 children. Major General Robert Mood, head of the United N... Explore this topic

The Syrian civil war is an ongoing armed conflict in Syria between forces loyal to the Syrian Ba'ath Party government and those seeking to oust it. The conflict began on 15 March 2011, with popular demonstrations that grew nationwide by April 2011. These demonstrations were pa... Explore this topic

Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south and Israel to the southwest. A country of fertile plains, high mountains and deserts, i... Explore this topic

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Civilian casualties is a military term describing civilian or non-combatant persons killed, injured, or imprisoned by military action. The description of civilian casualties includes any form of military action regardless of whether civilians were targeted directly. This diffe... Explore this topic

A summary execution is a variety of execution in which a person is accused of a crime and then immediately killed without benefit of a full and fair trial. This includes show trials, but is usually understood to mean capture, accusation, and execution all conducted during a ve... Explore this topic

Navanethem "Navi" Pillay is the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. A South African of Indian Tamil origin, she was the first non-white woman on the High Court of South Africa, and she has also served as a judge of the International Criminal Court and President ... Explore this topic

Speech is the vocalized form of human communication. It is based upon the syntactic combination of lexicals and names that are drawn from very large vocabularies. Each spoken word is created out of the phonetic combination of a limited set of vowel and consonant speech sound u... Explore this topic

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights was a functional commission within the overall framework of the United Nations from 1946 until it was replaced by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2006. It was a subsidiary body of the UN Economic and Social Council, and ... Explore this topic