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Syria's emergency law enshrines the autocratic nature of the Assad dynasty's rule. It restricts public gatherings and the free movement of individuals, it allows government agents to arrest "suspects or people who threaten security," it authorizes the monitoring of personal communications and it legalizes media censorship. It has been in place since the 1963 coup d'état that brought the Baath Party to power. That plot was instigated in part by Hafez al-Assad, the previous President and father of the current one. Indeed, as some observers have noted, the emergency law is older than President Bashar al-Assad himself.

But, suddenly, as Syria experiences the onslaught of the Arab Spring, the emergency law is becoming the regime's sacrificial lamb. Just days after announcing that a committee would be formed to study lifting the nearly half-century-old law, Syria's presidential adviser Buthaina Shaaban told several foreign journalists on Sunday that the measure would "absolutely" be repealed. She did not, however, say when that would happen.

The lightning decision appears to have been made without benefit of committee or recommendations — the regime's usual apparatus for watering down or ultimately rejecting reforms. Indeed, a proposal to review the emergency law that was put almost routinely forward just a month ago was unanimously rejected by Syria's rubber-stamp parliament, according to Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian dissident based in Washington, D.C., and visiting scholar at the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University.

All this takes place as the emergency law appears to have lost some of its teeth. On Friday, people in at least a dozen cities staged mass demonstrations demanding freedoms and reform, prompting a brutal security crackdown that left dozens of protesters dead. The demonstrations took place despite the emergency law's prohibition of such gatherings — and may indicate that, at least for now, large sections of the populace no longer feel cowed by the law. Perhaps to ameliorate public rancor, the regime also reportedly released some 260 political prisoners on Friday night from Saydnaya prison. Most had served the majority of their sentences.

The imminent repeal of the emergency law was welcomed by Ziadeh and other dissidents contacted by TIME. They nonetheless cautioned that in practical terms it may not mean real change. In theory, repealing the law will activate "about 40 items in the constitution which were frozen because of it, like freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate," says Ayman Abdel-Nour, a former Baathist and longtime friend of Assad's, who now lives in self-imposed exile in Dubai, where he edits the independent website All4syria.org. But in practice, he fears that just as the old law is discarded it will be replaced by a new, tougher one, enacted so that, in essence, Assad "will take with one hand what he gave with the other."

In addition, security forces are likely to continue to enjoy immunity from prosecution, a condition that affords them huge amounts of power. A separate act, Legislative Decree 14, issued in 1969, says that "no legal action may be taken against any employee of General Intelligence [the dreaded Mukhabarat] for crimes committed while carrying out their designated duties, except by an order issued by the director." No such order has ever been issued. In 2008, President Bashar al-Assad extended this immunity to members of other security forces through Legislative Decree 69.

There are other laws that inhibit freedom without the government having to turn to the emergency law. Apart from the wide-ranging powers still afforded to the security forces by virtue of their immunity from prosecution, membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, will remain a capital offense under Law 49 (1980).

"All the people know that lifting the emergency law doesn't mean anything on the ground without resolving all of these issues that are tied to it," Ziadeh says. Nevertheless, lifting the state of emergency imposed by the law will renew many personal freedoms inscribed in Syria's constitution. "Lifting it will give a big boost to the protesters, it will encourage them to continue, even though it doesn't really mean anything different on the ground," Ziadeh says.

In addition, Ziadeh says, the quick concessions may suggest that the regime is struggling to figure out how to stave off further turmoil. "It's a big weakness: they're taking steps back and aren't sure what to do," he says. "There is soft discourse from the regime but on the ground the security forces are shooting protesters with live bullets." Several dissident websites have posted reports of a split between Bashar and his younger brother Maher, who heads the Presidential Guard. That is impossible to verify. What appears more apparent is a fracture between the powerful Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa and the security forces. Sharaa hails from Dara'a, the city in southern Syria that has been the focal point of the unrest. The army beefed up its presence there on Sunday, as well as deploying in the northern port city of Lattakia, which has also seen bloody unrest. But Dara'a has been battered the hardest, with claims of double-digit death tolls reportedly at the hands of security forces.

According to a report in Syria's al-Watan daily last week, the Vice President traveled to Dara'a soon after protests started in order to assure demonstrators that they would not be targeted with live fire by security forces, especially in the vicinity of the town's central al-Omari Mosque. Despite his pledge, they were fired upon. That action by the security forces allegedly infuriated the Vice President, who has maintained an uncharacteristically low profile since.

The regime has also resorted to blaming "foreign hands," an old standby, for the turmoil, parading an Egyptian American on state-run television who claimed that he had been paid by a Colombian to "transmit images and videos about Syria" and that he had recently traveled to Israel, a state Syria remains technically at war with. The country's Grand Mufti, Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, also suggested foreign "instigation against Syria" emanated from Damascus' anti-Israeli foreign policy and support for militant groups including Hamas in Gaza and Hizballah in Lebanon.

Syrians have been expecting President Assad to address the nation for days. He is likely to announce further reforms, or at the minimum, speak of his openness to them. The Syrian regime, though just as autocratic and brutal as the now overthrown regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, could always boast that its young President, who was trained as a physician, was more attuned to the needs of his people. Even U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has indicated that Assad has a reformist bent, though she demanded that his regime cease killing its own citizens. She did say, however, that the Syrian leadership is unlikely to receive the same treatment as Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, who also threatened his people with violence. That's one thing that the Syrian President doesn't have to worry about. Now he just has to hope he can say the right things.

• Rania Abouzeid
• The regime's dramatic announcement that it would soon repeal its stringent emergency law may not lead to too much change on the ground for protesters