The fall of Syria’s government has breathed new life into a long push for justice over crimes committed by the Assad regime. Now, at last, there is a chance for human rights groups to inspect prison sites, freely interview witnesses and quickly build legal cases for prosecution.
Yet there is also frustration because the ultimate goal of the effort would be to see the deposed president, Bashar al-Assad, stand trial, according to rights activists who spoke this week about their work on Syria.
With Mr. al-Assad in Russia, according to officials in Moscow, that prospect appears out of reach. Activists, many of whom have devoted years to the effort, remain undeterred.
“We are targeting the system,” said Fadel Abdul Ghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights. “The Assad regime is not just the man himself. We need to target the security forces and the army and the tools Assad used to commit those crimes.”
The war in Syria has been a watershed for human rights work, in part because of the scale of the abuses committed. In addition to the more than 200,000 civilians reported to have been killed in the war, at least 15,000 people are believed to have died from torture or to have been killed in the regime’s prison system, and some 130,000 are still missing, according to Mr. Abdul Ghany’s group.
Organizations including the Commission for International Justice and Accountability and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights have worked to document abuses and crimes to lay the groundwork for future prosecutions.
That drive received a major boost in its early years when a former Syrian police photographer, code-named Caesar, defected in 2013 with gruesome photographs of thousands of prisoners who had been killed in detention.
Rights groups said that they had benefited from the regime’s practice of documenting what happened in the prison system for bureaucratic purposes. The groups have made use of digital tools that were not available in previous conflicts to catalog abuses.
Mr. al-Assad has said that anyone in prison in Syria committed a crime, and cast doubt on testimony about abuses. But activists said the records enabled them to trace links between perpetrators, such as prison guards and policymakers, in a crucial step toward any prosecutions of senior officials.
“Even before he fell from power, we already had enough documents to show beyond reasonable doubt his real power over the machinery of death that the Syrian state was,” said Nerma Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.
Augmenting those efforts, other groups are cataloging the Assad government’s crimes, including a U.N. Syria Commission, which has issued detailed reports, and a group established by the U.N. General Assembly. All that work has borne fruit in several prosecutions of Syrian officials abroad.
The most prominent of them began in The Hague last year at the International Court of Justice, which held a hearing after a complaint by Canada and the Netherlands saying that violations in Syria had been committed on a “massive scale.”
The year before, a German court sentenced a former Syrian intelligence officer to life in prison after he was convicted of crimes against humanity.
French judges last year issued an international arrest warrant for Mr. al-Assad for complicity in both crimes against humanity and war crimes, following an investigation into chemical attacks in 2013. And just this week, the U.S. Justice Department charged two top Syrian military officials with war crimes committed against Americans and others at a prison in Damascus.
But several factors have inhibited the push for accountability. For one, defections stopped around 2015, when Mr. al-Assad’s regime appeared to have stabilized, cutting off one source of testimony about abuses. More significantly, Syria is not a member of the International Criminal Court, so the court does not have jurisdiction over crimes committed on its soil. Russia and China vetoed a resolution in the U.N. Security Council to refer Syria to the court, blocking that avenue.
“Up until now the doors to the courtroom have largely been elusive,” said Balkees Jarrah, a lawyer and senior official with the international justice program at Human Rights Watch. “With this sudden political change there is a critical window, but a better future for Syria requires a comprehensive plan for justice.”
With Mr. al-Assad gone, one option would be for the rebels now in power to accept the international court’s jurisdiction over Syria, giving the court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, the authority to open investigations retroactively, several experts said. In doing so it would follow Ukraine, which has granted the court jurisdiction over its territory even though it is not a member.
Mr. Abdul Ghany, who is Syrian, said the country should also become a member of the court as part of the process of re-establishing the rule of law.
A second option would be for national courts to file charges under the concept of universal jurisdiction, under which any national court may prosecute individuals accused of heinous offenses.
While prosecutions in venues outside Syria matter, it is far more important to restore the country’s own judicial system and start the process of holding officials accountable in national courts, the experts said.
Such prosecutions have had a powerful impact in other post-conflict countries, enabling citizens to witness justice at work, according to Stephen J. Rapp, a former international prosecutor and former U.S. ambassador at large for global justice who has been involved with Syria for more than a decade.
“Even where we have had a successful international justice process, the national cases were more helpful in allowing reconciliation,” Mr. Rapp said.
The leader of the alliance that toppled the government, Ahmed al-Shara, also known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, said on Tuesday that the new administration would hold “criminals, murderers and military and security officials” who committed torture accountable — suggesting at least the possibility that starting a domestic legal process against them was a high priority.
To assist with that effort, one of the most prominent Syrian human rights leaders, Mouaz Moustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, said on Monday that he was immediately returning to the country.
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