© AFP/File Louai Beshara

DAMASCUS (AFP) - Human rights groups in Syria on Thursday called for the release of a former communist and woman dentist who has been jailed on a verdict which dates back 15 years.

"Tuhama Maaruf, 46, was arrested in Aleppo (north Syria) on February 6 and transferred to Damascus central prison to serve out a six-year prison term with hard labour, a sentence passed in 1995," they said in a joint statement.

It said Maaruf was imprisoned in 1992 for a year, but then released pending her trial.

In 1995, she was condemned to the six-year sentence for "membership of a secret organisation (the banned Communist Workers' Party) which aims to change the economic and social status of the state," it said.

But the sentence was not implemented until February this year.

The groups, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Syrian League for the Defence of Human Rights, expressed "surprise at the determination of Syrian authorities to implement a verdict many years old."

They called for the immediate release of Maaruf, who is married and has two children, stressing that the woman dentist had "undertaken no banned political activity since 1993."