Oslo: The European Union, winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, said at the award ceremony on Monday that the conflict in Syria was “a stain” on the world’s conscience.
“Let me say it from here today,” said European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso. “The current situation in Syria is a stain on the world’s conscience and the international community has a moral duty to address it.”
Barroso said that on international human rights day, the thoughts of the 27-nation bloc were with those “all over the world who put their lives at risk to defend the values that we cherish.”
At talks in Brussels on Monday, EU foreign ministers were discussing the situation in Syria, where heavy fighting was continuing in a 21-month conflict against the regime President Bashar Al Assad.
On ground in Syria, rebels and forces loyal to Al Assad clashed in Damascus, with some exchanges less than a mile from the presidential office, an opposition group said.
Sporadic gunfire and explosions were heard in Salhiyeh, a neighbourhood close to the president’s office, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Monday. Fighting was also reported throughout the city, the Observatory said.
The conflict in Syria has entered its final stages, and the US and Russia are in talks on a transition of power in the state, Arab League Secretary-General Nabeel Al Arabi said in Doha on Sunday, according to Al Jazeera television.
Al Assad’s military has lost control of barracks, heavy weapons, oilfields and roads across the country. Fighters struggling to topple the government in Damascus have control of mainly Sunni Muslim areas stretching from the northeastern outskirts of the capital to the southwest of the city.
More than 42,000 people have been killed in the violence, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Meanwhile, Germany expelled four employees of the Syrian embassy in Berlin, the foreign minister said, as part of moves to sharply curb ties to the regime.
“We are sending a clear message with the expulsion of four Syrian embassy staff that we are reducing relations with the [Al] Assad regime to an absolute minimum,” Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said in a statement.
“We are counting on the [opposition] national coalition growing more stable and developing as soon as possible functioning institutions for the political transition,” he added.
Germany had expelled its Syrian ambassador in May, along with France, Britain, Italy and Spain following a massacre of more than 100 people in the Houla region, north of Homs.
And in February, it threw out another four Syrian diplomats after the arrest of two men suspected of spying on regime opponents in Germany.
