By Robert Damon

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has decreed that a referendum on the new draft constitution will be held on 26 February, states a media report.

The document drops the article giving the ruling Baath Party unique status as the leader of state and society.

The opposition has made clear that it rejects any political moves by the government while there are still violent attacks against protesters.

 On Sunday, President Assad received a copy of Syria's proposed new constitution, which took a national committee four months to produce.

Committee members said they had sought to write a document that guarantees the dignity of the Syrian citizen and secures his basic rights and turns Syria into an example to follow in terms of public freedoms and political plurality, the state news agency Sana reported.

When the new constitution is approved, Syria will have passed the most important stage of laying down the constitutional and legal structure through the reforms and laws that have already been issued to take the country to a new era in co-operation with all spectrums of the Syrian people, Mr Assad was quoted as saying.

The Sana report did not go into detail about the draft constitution, but officials said it did not include Article 8, which made the Baath Party the exclusive leader of both politics and society.

They also said the draft stated that the president could hold office only for a maximum of two seven-year terms. Mr Assad, who succeeded his late father, Hafez, has been in power since 2000.

New political parties could also not be based on a religion, profession, or regional interests, they added. This would prevent the Muslim Brotherhood and Kurdish groups in the north-west from establishing parties.

But, the BBC's correspondent over there says Syria is a country in crisis, and it is hard to see how a referendum can be carried out efficiently and credibly at short notice.

In April, President Assad scrapped the Emergency Law, which had effectively suspended most constitutional protections since the Baath Party came to power in a military coup in 1962. Since that announcement, human rights activists say more than 7,000 people have been killed by security forces.

A member of the main opposition coalition, the Syrian National Council, dismissed both the draft constitution and the plan to hold a referendum.

The Syrian regime is trying another trick in the book to divert attention away from the crimes against humanity happening in Syria in the past three months, but especially in the past few weeks in Homs and in the countryside of Damascus, Idlib and Hama, Anas al-Abdah told the BBC.

Such a regime does not have the moral or the political ability to propose a new constitution to the Syrian people.

Mr Abdah added: The main problem is not the constitution, but the fact that the state has complete control over the army and security forces. As long as you keep that, everything else is just empty promises.

The proposed constitution does not tackle that in any way or form. It is working towards keeping the current regime in place.