Assad’s regime on trial for crimes against humanity. The court is about to rule on most senior official yet
Anwar Raslan, a senior regime official, headed the investigation unit at a notorious Damascus detention center known as Branch 251. Raslan’s trial is seen as the culmination of nearly a decade of evidence collected by activists and lawyers seeking to hold the Assad regime accountable for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the early years of Syria’s uprising-turned-war, which began in 2011, volunteers known as “document hunters” smuggled out hundreds of thousands of documents from abandoned regime facilities. Many said they braved an onslaught of bullets and rockets to smuggle out papers that served as evidence in investigations against the regime. In 2013, a defector codenamed Caesar smuggled tens of thousands of photographs showing prisoners allegedly tortured to death in Assad’s jails. The images were also part of the evidence in the landmark trial. Lawyers and activists vow to continue to pursue the prosecution of former and current regime officials implicated in crimes. In Germany, Raslan and Gharib were arrested under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which gives a state jurisdiction over crimes against international law even if these did not occur inside that state.The Syrian regime cannot be tried at the International Criminal Court because it is not party to it. Syria could be investigated by the ICC if the United Nations Security Council refers it, but Russia and China have blocked a previous attempt to do so by the UNSC. In July 2021, a German prosecutor indicted a Syrian regime doctor, Alaa Mousa, who is accused of burning the genitals of at least one prisoner. His trial begins in Frankfurt this month.”We all agree that this can only be a the first step,” Patrick Kroker, a lawyer with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights representing the joint plaintiffs, said in a Monday news conference. “There are international arrest warrants still outstanding against even higher-ranking persons and we hope and we demand that these will be pursued.” “There will be no safe haven in the world for these people.”
