Syria jails activist for D.C. meetings

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DAMASCUS, Syria -- A human rights activist was sentenced to 12 years in prison yesterday for meeting with Bush administration officials at the White House during a 2005 visit to Washington.

Kamal Labwani, a Syrian physician and democracy advocate, was convicted of "contacting a foreign country, passing on messages and encouraging attack against Syria," according to local reports, which noted that a maximum sentence could have been a lifetime of hard labor.

The sentence came as President Bashar Assad warned of growing political and military instability in the Middle East in his annual address to the Syrian parliament.

It also demonstrated a continued hard line a week after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met Syria's foreign minister in Egypt -- a meeting that signaled Washington's willingness to re-engage with a nation that it has described as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The State Department yesterday condemned the "harsh and unjust sentencing" of Dr. Labwani and said it reflects "the Syrian regime's contempt for human rights and a legal system devoid of legitimate legal standards."

Dr. Labwani was arrested at the Damascus airport in November 2005 on his return from Washington, where he had met with National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, among others.

Dr. Labwani, 50, is the second prominent Syrian reformer to draw a prison sentence in recent weeks. Anwar al-Bunni, a human rights lawyer who had spoken out about torture in Syrian prisons, received a five-year sentence on April 24 on charges of spreading false news that could weaken national morale and of contacting a foreign country.

The crackdown has provoked an outcry from pro-democracy groups.

"This is the harshest judgment against a prisoner of conscience since President Bashar al-Assad came to power," Ammar Qorabi, head of the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria, told Agence France-Presse.

Other human rights advocates have said in recent weeks that Mr. Assad's government has retreated from the early promise of the "Damascus Spring" -- a period in which dissidents were released from prison shortly after Mr. Assad succeeded his father in the presidential palace,.