Turkey is ready to work with the United Nations if a humanitarian crisis develops in neighboring Syria after months of deadly political unrest, its foreign minister was quoted as saying on Sunday.

"We hope that before the situation reaches that stage, the Syrian administration will halt the unjust war it has waged against its own people and find ways to make peace with its people," Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said on Sunday Riyadh was pulling its observers from the widely criticized Arab League observer mission to Syria because Damascus had not kept its promises.

Saudi Arabia "is withdrawing from the mission because the Syrian government has not respected any of the clauses" in the Arab plan aimed at ending the crisis there, he said according to the text of a statement he made at a ministerial meeting of the 22-member body in Cairo.

Syrian-British filmmaker Ghassan Abdullah was arrested on Sunday in Damascus as he was returning to his hometown of Daraa in the south of the unrest-swept country, a media rights group reported.

The Syrian Center for Media and Free Expression gave no further details on the arrest of the filmmaker, who has dual nationality.

Syrian security forces shot dead twelve people on Sunday across the country, activists said, as army defectors briefly overran a protest hub near Damascus.

The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said regime troops killed seven people in the Damascus suburbs of Douma, al-Kisweh and Talfita, three in the restive northwestern province of Idlib and one in each of the central opposition bastions of Hama and Homs.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has cancelled a Brussels visit Monday in order to follow the French Senate's vote on a bill criminalizing the denial of Armenian genocide, a spokesman said.

"We decided to postpone this trip in order to stay in Turkey, regardless of the outcome of the vote at the French Senate," the ministry spokesman told Agence France Presse on Sunday.

The opposition Syrian National Council plans to send a delegation to the United Nations to press the U.N. Security Council for intervention in unrest-swept Syria, an SNC spokesman told Agence France Presse on Sunday.

"The Council will send a delegation to the United Nations to submit a letter calling for the referral of the Syria file to the Security Council to protect civilians," Mohammed Sermini said in Cairo.

Human Rights Watch urged world powers to support the rights of Arab Spring protesters to build real democracies after they ousted long-time strongmen once backed by the West, in its annual report Sunday.

"Many democracies have allowed their ties with repressive allies to temper their support for human rights in the Arab Spring protests," HRW said in its report, launched in Cairo just three days before the anniversary of the revolt that toppled president Hosni Mubarak.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday called Egypt's foreign minister to discuss the country's economic and political situation, as well as events in Syria, the State Department said.

It said the telephone call covered the same ground as President Barack Obama's discussion with Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi on Friday, which the White House said was focused on Egypt's need for a democratic transition.

Two Lebanese fishermen and the body of a third were handed over to the Lebanese army through the Abboudiyeh crossing at dawn Sunday after they were seized by Syria off the coast of the town of Arida the day before.

Sixteen-year-old Maher Hamad was killed and his uncles Fadi and Khaled, were seized and taken to the coastal city of Tartus in Syria after the Syrian navy opened fire on their boat.

A key Syrian opposition activist has left her homeland and is living in France, an online newspaper reported Saturday.

"I left Syria, in secret, at the request of the revolutionaries," Suhair al-Atassi told the website Mediapart.