BEIRUT: Eyewitness reports have played a key role during the Arab Spring by generating international outrage and fueling further protests across the region in the face of government suppression, a leading international human rights group said during a gathering in Beirut.

Many authoritarian regimes have been ruthless in their efforts to crush dissent across the region and have also attempted to control the flow of information about such acts, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) at a talk held at the American University of Beirut Wednesday.

From Tunisia and Egypt, where governments reacted by detaining opposition figures and protesters, to Libya, where leader Moammar Gadhafi is using military planes to indiscriminately bomb civilians, HRW has been one of the first organizations to document abuses.

The rights group has now set up “round-the-clock monitoring teams” along the northern Lebanon-Syria border to interview incoming refugees and ascertain a clearer picture of the human rights situation in Syria, said Nadim Houry, HRW Beirut director.

Syria is currently is in the midst of a two-month old security crackdown against anti-regime protesters.

“Unlike journalists, we are not on 24-hour deadlines, allowing us to check and cross check stories,” said Houry. “Showing trends is key for us.”

This kind of thorough investigation and insistence on corroboration of facts allowed HRW last month to issue viable accusations that torture has become rampant in Syrian detention facilities. It has also helped the organization uncover credible evidence concerning abuses elsewhere in the Arab world.

Heba Morayef, a HRW Middle East and North Africa researcher, has been at the heart of much of the upheaval, leading efforts to compile initial reports about the Egyptian protests, which broke out on Jan. 25, and later the Libyan anti-regime demonstrations that started on Feb. 17.

“We started by going round hospitals in Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez, documenting the preliminary death toll from the demonstrations,” Morayef said.

“From the eight hospitals we surveyed we put the first toll at 298 deaths ... It was only partial but it was the first and it was an important part of the story,” she added.

Again, upon being one of the first foreign observers to enter Libya after Gadhafi’s forces withdrew from the western city of Benghazi, Morayef’s work was critical in noting violations, now being used by the International Criminal Court in its work against leading pro-Gadhafi figures.

“It was important to get the information out and it was only this that started to shift the international community,” said Morayef.

“By speaking to doctors and visiting hospitals we established that 237 people died in Benghazi in three days of [fighting]. This number may not be as attractive as some of the figures – 5,000 to 6,000 – that were being floated about ... But it is much more powerful,” she added.