UNITED NATIONS — A United Nations panel investigating potential war crimes in Syria’s civil war threatened on Friday to release a closely guarded list of names of those it accuses of having raped, tortured and carried out executions during the conflict. The move was part of an effort to increase pressure on world powers to pursue justice for what it calls crimes that “shock the conscience of humanity.”

The confidential lists — four have been compiled so far, and a fifth combining all of them is underway — contain scores of names, according to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, and have been seen by no one other than its four members. The commission, in a report released Friday, said it was considering releasing the names at the annual meeting of the Human Rights Council next month, saying that not doing so “at this juncture of the investigation would be to reinforce the impunity that the commission was mandated to combat.”

The report, the ninth released by the commission, said the confidential list of names included “commanders of army and security units, including heads of detention facilities and other individuals operating under the command of the government or in its support, and commanders of nonstate armed groups, including the so-called ‘emirs’ of radical groups.”

What it would take for the panel to decide to publish the names remained unclear. Speaking to reporters here on Friday morning, the chairman of the commission, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, said only that victims had the right to know and that he and his fellow commissioners would make a decision in the coming weeks. “We have not decided yet,” Mr. Pinheiro said before he and his fellow members went into a closed-door informal session of the Security Council.