23 Dec 2022; MEMO: The United States Alternate Representative for Special Political Affairs to the United Nations Robert Wood has called on the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad to "constructively" participate in the Syrian Constitutional Committee meetings.
Speaking at the UN Security Council Briefing on the Political and Humanitarian Situation in Syria, Wood said America regrets that there has been "no progress" on the Constitutional Committee, adding that its work has been blocked by arbitrary demands from Russia on unrelated issues.
"We support a Syrian-led, Syrian owned process," he said, calling on the Assad regime to cooperate with Special Envoy Pedersen's efforts to reconvene the Constitutional Committee, agree to and implement a comprehensive, nationwide ceasefire, and humanely release the more than 130,000 missing and arbitrarily detained persons.
The Russian President's Special Envoy to Syria, Alexander Lavrentiev, had confirmed that Russia "proposed moving the Syrian Constitutional Committee meetings to Abu Dhabi, Muscat and Manama."
Lavrentiev explained that Moscow believes that it is necessary to choose a new location for the Syrian Constitutional Committee meetings instead of the city of Geneva, which has lost its "neutral status".
For his part, the co-chair of the Constitutional Committee, Hadi Al-Bahra had previously announced that he had received an official letter from the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, stating that the ninth round of the committee's meetings, scheduled to be held on 35 July, had been postponed indefinitely.
