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International and national courts outside Syria have begun the prosecution of Syrian civil war criminals. War crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government or rebel groups include extermination, murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture and imprisonment.[recorded 1] "[A]ccountability for serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights is central to achieving and maintaining durable peace in Syria", stated UNUnder-Secretary-GeneralRosemary DiCarlo.[2]
The first war crimes trial related to the Syrian civil war concluded on 12 July 2016 in Germany. It was the case of Aria L.[a] performed under the Völkerstrafgesetzbuch (Code of Crimes against International Law (CCAIL)).[3] As of December 2024[update], the evidence collection and cooperation with prosecutors by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (COI) had led to 50 convictions for war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Syrian civil war.[4]
According to three international lawyers,[5] Syrian government officials were expected to risk facing war crimes charges in the light of a huge cache of evidence smuggled out of the country showing the "systematic killing" of about 11,000 detainees, constituting the 2014 Syrian detainee report. Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were emaciated, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had no eyes; others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution.[6] Experts said this evidence was more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that had emerged from the then 34-month crisis.[7]
The United Nations (UN) summarised the human rights situation by stating that "siege warfare is employed in a context of egregious human rights and international humanitarian law violations. The warring parties do not fear being held accountable for their acts." Armed forces of both sides of the conflict blocked access of humanitarian convoys, confiscated food, cut off water supplies and targeted farmers working their fields. The report pointed to four places besieged by the government forces: Muadamiyah, Daraya, Yarmouk camp and Old City of Homs, as well as two areas under siege of rebel groups: Aleppo and Hama.[8][9] In Yarmouk Camp 20,000 residents are facing death by starvation due to blockade by the Syrian government forces and fighting between the army and Jabhat al-Nusra, which prevents food distribution by UNRWA.[8][10] In July 2015, the UN quietly removed Yarmouk from its list of besieged areas in Syria, despite not having been able deliver aid there for four months, and declined to explain why it had done so.[11]
Forces of the Islamic State (IS) militant group have been accused by the UN of using public executions, amputations, and lashings in a campaign to instill fear. "Forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham have committed torture, murder, acts tantamount to enforced disappearance and forced displacement as part of attacks on the civilian population in Aleppo and Raqqa governorates, amounting to crimes against humanity", said the report from 27 August 2014.[12]
Enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions have also been a feature since the Syrian uprising began.[13] An Amnesty International report, published in November 2015, accused the Syrian government of forcibly disappearing more than 65,000 people since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War.[14] According to a report in May 2016 by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 60,000 people have been killed since March 2011 through torture or from poor humanitarian conditions in Syrian government prisons.[15]
In February 2017, Amnesty International published a report which accused the Syrian government of murdering an estimated 13,000 persons, mostly civilians, at the Saydnaya military prison. They said the killings began in 2011 and were still ongoing. Amnesty International described this as a "policy of deliberate extermination" and also stated that "These practices, which amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, are authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government."[16] Three months later, the United States State Department stated a crematorium had been identified near the prison. According to the U.S., it was being used to burn thousands of bodies of those killed by the government's forces and to cover up evidence of atrocities and war crimes.[17] Amnesty International expressed surprise at the claims about the crematorium, as the photographs used by the US are from 2013 and they did not see them as conclusive, and fugitive government officials have stated that the government buries those its executes in cemeteries on military grounds in Damascus.[18] The Syrian government denied the allegations.
Perpetrators
Four key security agencies have overseen government repression in Syria: the General Security Directorate, the Political Security Branch, the Military Intelligence Branch, and the Air Force Intelligence Branch. All three corps of the Syrian army have been deployed in a supporting role to the security forces; the civilian police have been involved in crowd control. The shabiha, led by the security forces, also participated in abuses.[19]: 8–10 Since Hafez al-Assad's rule, individuals from the Alawite minority have controlled (although they not always formally headed) these four agencies, as well as several elite military units,[20]: 72–3 and comprise the bulk of them.[21]
All governments manage their territories with national laws. Prosecution for war crimes under the national laws of a given country [Germany, Netherlands ...] would typically depend on either the accused, the victim's residence or the occurrence of the event being in that country. Universal jurisdiction bypasses this constraint. In this mechanism, the "cases" that have no connection to the territory [e.g. crimes in high seas] have been used by prosecutors and have been criticized by human rights organisations as leading to a de facto presence requirement [e.g. existence of a crime can not be solved through collecting unbiased evidence from the crime scene, as the court don't have untethered access].
There are many perpetrators residing in Syria [the occurrence, the accused (is a Syrian national), the victim (is a Syrian national)]. International crimes are typically state crimes.[b][22] If [since] a state is connected to a crime (directly or indirectly), most of the powerful perpetrators (state officials) reside in Syria. In such situations, the International Court of Justice is the judicial organ to settle international legal disputes submitted by states (UN) against other states.
International courts
Richard Haass has argued that one way to encourage top-level defections is to "threaten war-crimes indictments by a certain date, say, August 15, for any senior official who remains a part of the government and is associated with its campaign against the Syrian people. Naming these individuals would concentrate minds in Damascus."[23]
Nevertheless, it remains unlikely in the short term, and some would argue this is a blessing in disguise, since this precludes the ICC's involvement while the conflict is still raging, a development that would arguably only increase the Assad government's violent obstinacy. The "United States cannot halt or reverse the militarization of the Syrian uprising, and should not try. What the United States can usefully do is manage this militarization by working with other governments, especially Syria’s neighbors in the region, to try to shape the activities of armed elements on the ground in a manner that will most effectively increase pressure on the regime".[24]
On 22 December 2016, with 105 votes in favour and 15 against, with 52 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly has voted to establish an "independent panel to assist in the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for war crimes or crimes against humanity in Syria".[25]
Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria
On Wednesday, 7 August 2019, the UN Security Council was briefed by the COI on its findings.[2]
As of December 2024[update], the COI had collected 11,000 testimonies from victims and witnesses, had studied "mounds of documents", and had cooperated with 170 investigations of suspected Syrian war criminals, among which there had been 50 convictions for war crimes and crimes against humanity.[4]
International Criminal Court
The U.N. Security Council has refused to address the crimes in Syria through ICC.
Referral could alternatively happen via the Security Council, but Russia and China would block.[27]Marc Lynch, who is in favour of a referral, noted a couple of other routes to the ICC were possible, and that overcoming Chinese and Russian opposition was not impossible.[28]
Special Tasked Court
Outside of the ICC, "some believe it would be possible to set up an ad hoc tribunal with a mandate to prosecute atrocities in Syria and Iraq. Such a tribunal would likely come in the form of a hybrid court and include a mix of domestic and international prosecutors and judges. Numerous observers, primarily American scholars and lawmakers, have pushed the establishment of such an institution, going so far as to draft a 'blueprint' for institution's statute. As with an ICC referral, their efforts have been unsuccessful to date."[29] Mark Kersten of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, however, notes that it would be an "unprecedented challenge" to "prosecute all sides in the war that have committed war crimes" while at the same time retaining "the support of the major actors in the Syrian civil war, many of whom are implicated and would be prosecuted, for those war crimes."[29]
In 2023, Canada and Netherlands jointly filed a lawsuit against the Assad government at the International Court of Justice (ICJ); charging Bashar with ordering torture, mass rapes and other de-humanising tactics on hundreds of thousands of detainees in Syrian prison networks, including women and children. The joint petition accused the Syrian government of organizing "unimaginable physical and mental pain and suffering" as a strategy to collectively punish the Syrian population.[30][31][32] In a separate statement, Dutch Foreign Ministry accused Bashar al-Assad of perpetrating indiscriminate violence, war crimes and inhumane tactics against the Syrian people "on a grand scale".[33] This was after repeated Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council that blocked efforts by human rights activists to prosecute Bashar al-Assad over war crimes in the International Criminal Court.[34]
In January 2024, a Brussels court indicted Hossin A, former leader of a Ba'athist militia based in Salamiyah that perpetrated acts of torture, extrajudicial killings of numerous Syrians, and violent repression of protests on behalf of the government of Syria. The Belgian federal prosecutor's office charged the individual with committing war crimes and "crimes against humanity" between 2011 and 2016.[36][37]
"the battle against crime, against impunity is part of French diplomacy. We have to remember who Bashar al-Assad is. He's a leader who has been the enemy of his own people for more than 10 years.. So long as he doesn't change, so long as he doesn't commit to reconciliation... so long as he doesn't fulfil his commitments, there's no reason to change our attitude towards him."[44]
In November 2023, France issued international arrest warrants for Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher and two Syrian Arab Armed Forces generals Ghassam Abbas and Bassam al-Hassan, charging them with "complicity in crimes against humanity and complicity in war crimes" over their roles in perpetrating the Ghouta chemical attacks.[45][46] The arrest warrant for Bashar al-Assad was appealed by prosecutors from an anti-terrorist legal unit. The appeal was rejected and the warrant was confirmed on 26 June 2024.[47]
In May 2024, France conducted a trial in absentia for three Syrian Ba'athist officials accused of war crimes: Jamil Hassan, Ali Mamlouk, and Abdel Salam Mahmoud.[48] The French court declared the three officials to be guilty of "crimes against humanity and war crimes" and sentenced them to life imprisonment. The judges of the French tribunal stated that two Franco-Syrian citizens were tortured to death alongside thousands of civilians held as captives in the detention centres of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate.[49][50]
Germany has legally enacted universal jurisdiction (used on pirates and slave traders) to allow prosecutions for war crimes committed anywhere, against any people of any citizenship. German authorities started conduct a background inquiry to gather information in 2011. The aim (Strukturverfahren) was to establish war crimes cases, whether in Germany or in courts elsewhere (such as the International Criminal Court).[35] The investigative/protective units are organised under the federal prosecutor's office with 11 staff members, and 17 war-crimes police officers.[35] The police war-crimes unit established a total of 17 cases from 2011 to 2013 and 2,590 from 2014 to 2016.[35]
Under the Völkerstrafgesetzbuch (Code of Crimes against International Law (CCAIL)), the first German war crimes trial related to atrocities committed in the Syrian Civil War was the case of Aria L., a German who had been involved in Islamist and Salafist groups in Germany since 2013 and had travelled to Idlib in Syria in 2014. Aria L. was photographed in three separate photos in front of severed heads of Syrian army members mounted on metal spears. He was convicted of the war crime of treating protected persons in a gravely humiliating or degrading manner and sentence to two years' imprisonment on 12 July 2016.[3]
German prosecutors charged two Syrians, Kamel T. and Azad R. in 2016[51] and Basel A. and Majed A. in 2018,[52] for joining Salafist militant group such as Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra.
On 23 August 2019, a 33-year-old Syrian (name undisclosed) was charged in the western Germany city of Koblenz with committing war crimes.[53]
In late October 2019, two Syrians suspected of having been secret service officers, Anwar Raslan and Eyad al-Gharib, were arrested in Germany and charged with crimes against humanity. Anwar Raslan was charged with 59 counts of murder, and rape and sexual assault. Eyad al-Gharib was charged with aiding and abetting a crime against humanity. Part of the evidence was based on the photographs of the 2014 Syrian detainee report, taken by a former Syrian military police photographer, nicknamed Caesar for security reasons.[54][55]
In May 2020, a Syrian doctor, Hafiz A., from Homs was accused of beating and torturing rebel men by the federal prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe.[56] In June 2020, another Syrian doctor from Homs, Alaa Moussa, was arrested in Hesse on suspicion of crimes against humanity.[57][58]
In September 2020, during the trial of Anwar Raslan and Eyad al-Gharib in Koblenz, some documents were acquired from the Branch 251 intelligence unit in Syria, which showed the move of corpses from the unit to military hospitals.[59]
On November 19, 2020, Fares A.B. was convicted of "war crimes, attempted homicide, torture, and membership of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)". Germany’s Federal Court of Justice later upheld his conviction.[60]
In January 2021, two Syrians, Khedr A.K. and Sami A.S., were charged with membership in Jabhat al-Nusra and killing of an army officer in their homeland in 2012.[61] In February 2021, former Syrian state official Eyad al-Gharib, was sentenced by a German court in Koblenz to four-and-a-half-years in prison for crimes against humanity.[62] In January 2022, the German state court in Koblenz declared Anwar Raslan, a former colonel who worked under the Syrian Mukhabarat's infamous Branch 251 unit, guilty of "murder, torture, aggravated deprivation of liberty, rape and sexual assault", sentencing him to "life imprisonment". Raslan was the chief of an office of Branch 251 in Damascus, wherein he directed the “systematic and brutal torture” of more than 4,000 Syrians between April 2011 and September 2012, leading to the killings of more than 58 prisoners. Prosecutors stated that the torture operations supervised by Raslan included electric shocks and various forms of sexual violence.[63][64]
Ahmad H., the alleged former leader of a Shabiha militia, was arrested in Germany in August 2023.[65] The suspect was charged with crimes against humanity for having taken part in the torture and abuse of civilians on multiple occasions between 2012 and 2015.[66] On 18 December 2024 he was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment.[67]
Netherlands
Netherlands is using concept of universal jurisdiction (Dutch version) laws to prosecute their cases.
On 2 September 2019, Ahmad al Khedr, also known as Abu Khuder, faced charges of murder and membership of Jabhat al-Nusra.[68] In July 2021, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for war crimes over his role in the execution of a government soldier.[69]
In January 2024, a district court in The Hague convicted a former member of the pro-Ba'athist "Liwa al-Quds" militia, who was charged with conducting abductions, "complicity in torture", "inhumane treatment" and "membership in a criminal organisation". The Hague district court labelled the "Liwa al-Quds" militant group as a "criminal organization" and stated that its fighters were involved in the perpetration of "looting and violence against civilians and unlawful deprivation of liberty of civilians".[70][71]
Sweden
In 2017, a Swedish court convicted former Syrian soldier Muhammad Abdullah of war crimes committed during the Syrian war and sentenced him to eight months in prison.[72] Abdullah had reportedly moved to Sweden three years previously, and was identified by other Syrian refugees after posting an image on Facebook showing him with his boot on a corpse, smiling. Prosecutors failed to prove that he killed the person depicted, but convicted him of "violating human dignity" in what the New York Times described as a "landmark verdict".[73]
On 19 February 2019, nine torture survivors submitted a criminal complaint against Syrian officials.[74]
In 2024, former Syrian general Mohammed Hamo was charged with aiding and abetting war crimes. His trial began in Stockholm on April 15.[75] He was acquitted, citing insufficient evidence.
Notes
^A German national, who has been a committed member of the Islamist and Salafist groups, murdered members of Syrian military personnel and in two of these cases produced his own picture with severed heads
^Indirectly: enabled by (state apparatus ignoring the perpetrator) or directly: perpetrated through the apparatus (black operations).
^Sir Desmond de Silva QC, former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, the former lead prosecutor of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević, and Professor David Crane, who indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia at the Sierra Leone court
^Goldston, James A. (8 August 2019). "Don't Give Up on the ICC". Foreign Policy. Archived from the original on 5 September 2019. Retrieved 6 September 2019.
^Lynch, Marc (4 March 2012). "Can the ICC take on Syria?". Abu Aardvark's Middle East Blog. FP.com. Archived from the original on 8 December 2014. Retrieved 6 July 2012.
