Syrian government officials could face 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, three eminent international lawyers say.
The three, former prosecutors at the criminal tribunals for Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, examined thousands of Syrian government photographs and files recording deaths in the custody of regime security forces from March 2011 to August last year.
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.
The UN and independent human rights groups have documented abuses by both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and rebels, but experts say this evidence is more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that has yet emerged from the 34-month crisis.
The three lawyers interviewed the source, a military policeman who worked secretly with a Syrian opposition group and later fled the country and defected.
In three sessions in 10 days they found him credible and truthful and his account “most compelling.”
They subjected all evidence to rigorous scrutiny, according to their report, which has been obtained by the Guardian and CNN.
The authors are Desmond de Silva, Queen’s Counsel (QC), former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone; Geoffrey Nice QC, the former lead prosecutor of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic; and Syracuse University College of Law professor David Crane, who indicted former Liberian president Charles Taylor at the Sierra Leone court.
The defector, who for security reasons is identified only as Caesar, was a photographer with the Syrian military police. He smuggled the images out of the country on memory sticks to a contact in the Syrian National Movement, which is supported by the Gulf state of Qatar. Qatar, which has financed and armed rebel groups, has called for the overthrow of al-Assad and demanded his prosecution for war crimes.
The 31-page report, which was commissioned by a leading firm of London solicitors acting for Qatar, is being made available to the UN, governments and human rights groups. Its publication appears deliberately timed to coincide with this week’s UN-organized Geneva II peace conference, which is designed to negotiate a way out of the Syrian crisis by creating a transitional government.
Caesar told the investigators his job was “taking pictures of killed detainees.”
He did not claim to have witnessed executions or torture, but he did describe a highly bureaucratic system.
“The procedure was that when detainees were killed at their places of detention, their bodies would be taken to a military hospital, to which he would be sent with a doctor and a member of the judiciary, Caesar’s function being to photograph the corpses,” the report says.
“There could be as many as 50 bodies a day to photograph, which require 15 to 30 minutes of work per corpse,” the report adds.
“The reason for photographing executed persons was twofold. First, to permit a death certificate to be produced without families requiring to see the body, thereby avoiding the authorities having to give a truthful account of their deaths; second, to confirm that orders to execute individuals had been carried out,” it says.
Families were told that the cause of death was either a “heart attack” or “breathing problems,” it added.
“The procedure for documentation was that when a detainee was killed each body was given a reference number which related to that branch of the security service responsible for his detention and death. When the corpse was taken to the military hospital it was given a further number so as to document, falsely, that death had occurred in the hospital. Once the bodies were photographed they were taken for burial in a rural area,” according to the report.
Three experienced forensic science experts examined and authenticated samples of 55,000 digital images, comprising about 11,000 victims.
“Overall there was evidence that a significant number of the deceased were emaciated and a significant minority had been bound and/or beaten with rod-like objects,” the report says.
“In only a minority of the cases could a convincing injury that would account for death be seen, but any fatal injury to the back of the body would not be represented in the images. The forensics team make clear that there are many ways in which an individual may be killed with minimal or even absent external evidence of the mechanism,” it continues.
The inquiry team said it was satisfied there was “clear evidence, capable of being believed by a tribunal of fact in a court of law, of systematic torture and killing of detained persons by the agents of the Syrian government. It would support findings of crimes against humanity and could also support findings of war crimes against the current Syrian regime.”
De Silva told the Guardian that the evidence “documented industrial-scale killing.”
“This is a smoking gun of a kind we didn’t have before. It makes a very strong case indeed,” he said.
Calls for al-Assad or others to face justice at the International Criminal Court in The Hague have foundered because Syria is not a member of the court, and the required referral by the UN Security Council might not be supported by the US and UK, or would be blocked by Russia, Syria’s close ally.
“It would not necessarily be possible to track back with any degree of certainty to the head of state. Ultimately, in any war crimes trial you can imagine a prosecutor arguing that the overall quantity of evidence meant that the pattern of behavior would have been approved at a high level,” Nice said.
“But whether you can go beyond that and say it must be head of state-approved is rather more difficult. But ‘widespread and systematic’ does betoken government control,” he said.
“Now we have direct evidence of what was happening to people who had disappeared. This is the first provable, direct evidence of what has happened to at least 11,000 human beings who have been tortured and executed and apparently disposed of,” Crane said.
“This is just amazing. This is the type of evidence that a prosecutor looks for and hopes for,” he said.
“We have pictures, with numbers that marry up with papers with identical numbers — official government documents. We have the person who took those pictures. That’s beyond-reasonable-doubt-type evidence,” Crane said.
Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch said his organization had not had the opportunity to authenticate the images, but he said: “We have documented repeatedly how Syria’s security services regularly torture — sometimes to death — detainees in their custody. These photos — if authentic — suggest that we may have only scratched the surface of the horrific extent of torture in Syria’s notorious dungeons. There is only one way to get to the bottom of this and that is for the negotiating parties at Geneva II to grant unhindered access to Syria’s detention facilities to independent monitors.”
The lawyers
The authors of the Syria report are three of the world’s most prominent war crimes prosecutors.
Sir Desmond de Silva QC (chairman) is former chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. He brought about the arrest of former Liberian president Charles Taylor and is often referred to as the “Scarlet Pimpernel” for saving so many people from execution in Commonwealth countries that still use capital punishment. In 2010, he was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate Israel’s deadly interception of a Gaza-bound flotilla.
Sir Geoffrey Nice QC was lead prosecutor of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Nice initiated the prosecution’s case linking atrocities to Milosevic, who died in custody in 2006 before his trial ended.
David Crane, a US law professor, was the first chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, from 2002 to 2005, and responsible for the indictment of Taylor. He was the first American since Justice Robert Jackson and Telford Taylor — at Nuremberg in 1945 — to be chief prosecutor of an international war crimes tribunal.
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