The situation for human rights in Syria is considered poor by international observers. A state of emergency was in effect from 1963 until April 2011, giving security forces sweeping powers of arrest and detention. Since the 1963 coup d'etat by its Military Committe that propelled the neo-Ba'athists to power, the Syrian Ba'ath party has operated a totalitarian state in Syria. Following a period of intra-party power-struggles that culminated in the 1970 coup, General Hafez al-Assad became the Syrian President; establishing a hereditary dictatorship of the Assad family. During the six decades of its rule, the security apparatus has banned all social, political and economic groups independent of the Ba'ath party or the regime; ensuring that the state has total monopoly over all forms of organizations. From 1973 to 2012, Syria was a single-party state. The authorities have been accused of harassing and imprisoning human rights activists and other critics of the government. Freedom of expression, association and assembly are strictly controlled, and women and ethnic minorities face discrimination. Throughout the decades-long reign of Assad dynasty between 1970 and 2011; over 70,000 Syrians were subjected to forced disappearances, more than 40,000 were executed through extrajudicial killings and hundreds of thousands of civilians became displaced through deportations. After an initial period of economic liberalization that failed to improve human rights in the early 2000s, Bashar al-Assad launched a string of crackdowns that imprisoned numerous intellectuals and cultural activists; thereby ending the Damascus Spring. As of 2010, Syria's human rights situation remained among the worst in the world; characterized by arbitrary arrests, surveillance by the dread secret police and systematic repression of ethnic minorities like Kurds. According to Amnesty International, the government is guilty of crimes against humanity based on "witness accounts of deaths in custody and extrajudicial executions, torture, rape, and arbitrary detention and forced disappearances during the crackdown against the 2011 uprising and during the Syrian Civil War. The government has also conducted chemical attacks against its own civilians. History of human rights French rule (1920–1946) From the early 1920s until 1946, Syria and Lebanon were under the control of a French Mandate, officially ratified by the League of Nations on 29 September 1923. Human rights concerns during this period included the colonialist treatment of the Druze within their autonomous state in the southern portion of the mandate, as prisoners and peasants there were often used for forced labor. During the