Syria has lived and is continuing to live a decade of brutal civil war. A civil war which, according to the UN Human Rights Council, has resulted in the deaths of over 350,200 people as of September 2021. Others, such as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the death toll even higher at around 500,000. These estimates come at a time when the war in Syria continues without abatement, with conflicts actually escalating in many areas.
The civil unrest and conflict in Syria has often seen government security forces under the command of dictator Bashar al-Assad turn on their own citizens, with reports of shocking violent tactics often occupying Western headlines and news channels over the past decade. Although it must be pointed out that, according to the UN, war crimes have been committed by both sides, the common victim of these violations is very often the innocent civilian. Despite this, Syrians have not been able to rely on consistent assistance from the international community, whose response to a civil war which has created the world’s largest refugee crisis has been one which has often kept the conflict at arm’s length.
However, the turn of the year may also have seen the turn of the tide in terms of the ways in which the international community is willing to engage in the Syrian crisis. On Thursday 13th January 2022, in a court room in Koblenz, Germany, former Syrian intelligence officer Anwar Raslan, 58, was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Raslan, a former colonel, was alleged to have been in charge of the infamous Al Khatib detention centre in Damascus from April 2011 until September 2012, and, as per the charges against him, oversaw rape, the torture of over 4000 people, and the deaths of a further 58.
The verdict comes after Raslan was arrested in Germany in 2019, having first arrived in the country in 2014, originally seeking asylum there after his defection from the Assad regime in 2012. It has been hailed by many as a landmark verdict, with Stefanie Bock of the International Research and Documentation Centre for War Crimes at the University of Marburg stating that it shows “there is no safe-haven for war criminals”.
However, others are more cautious in their assessment of the verdict’s significance, with Wolfgang Kaleck of the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the group which successfully brought the case to trial, admitting that universal jurisdiction, the mechanism which allowed for Raslan to be tried in Germany, “always comes too late”. Others have also pointed to the overall minor role which Raslan held in the wider Assad regime, as well as the fact he defected just a year after civil war first broke out.
Ordinary Syrians, however, will be hoping that this sort of trial will be the first of many.
By Samuel Blencoe.
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