Amnesty International wrote urging Bashar al-Assad to put high on its agenda by releasing political prisoners in Syria. 

"Today, on the 20th anniversary of the massacre of hundreds of prisoners in Tadmur Prison, we call on the Syrian government to dedicate itself to building a state of law and human rights", Amnesty International said. 

The human rights organization stressed that the resolution of the issue of political prisoners should be considered of first importance. Thousands of detainees have "disappeared", their whereabouts not known to their families or extrajudicially executed. At least 1,500 are believed to remain, most of them still detained in secret without access to families, in other prisons and detention centres. 

"On our last visit in 1997 we handed over to the Syrian Government a list of 661 political detainees, a small proportion of the thousands of names of those detained or 'disappeared' in our files, and we were prepared to discuss each individual case with the Syrian Government. Unfortunately, they were not ready to discuss the lists," said Amnesty International. "We would be ready to come back at any time". 

Former detainees have described the prison regime in Tadmur as one of humiliation, hunger and constant torture. 

"Death is a daily occurrence, lurking in torture, random beating up, the gouging of eyes, the breaking of limbs ? It stares one in the face and is staved off only by coincidences over 17 years" , wrote one prisoner of Tadmur, in a letter smuggled out of Syria this year. 

The full press release on the AI web site