Researching in safety
Human rights, civil rights, international law – these are the topics Syrian legal scholar Anan Al Sheikh Haidar focussed on at Damascus University. Secret service staff regularly attended her lectures, and she was under permanent surveillance. Anan Al Sheikh Haidar was one of the five opponents of the regime in her faculty, who were against Assad’s government and stood up for more democracy. Three of them were arrested, and Haidar has not heard from one of them since. “We were afraid the secret service would arrest us, too,” she says. Her husband Housamedden Darwish, a philosophy lecturer, was also under surveillance. He reported in Syria about the Arab Spring and occasionally went into hiding.
