France’s highest court was to rule yesterday on whether it could strip the immunity of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who is now in exile in Russia, because of the brutality of the evidence in accusations against him collected by Syrian activists and European prosecutors.
If the judges at the Cour de Cassation lift al-Assad’s immunity, it could pave the way for his trial in absentia over the use of chemical weapons in Ghouta in 2013 and Douma in 2018, and set a precedent to allow the prosecution of other government leaders linked to atrocities, human rights activists and lawyers said.
A ruling against al-Assad would be “a huge victory for the victims,” said Mazen Darwish, president of the Syrian Center for Media, which collected evidence of war crimes.
Photo: AP
“It’s not only about Syrians, this will open the door for the victims from any country and this will be the first time that a domestic investigative judge has the right to issue an arrest warrant for a president during his rule,” Darwish said.
The ruling could enable the group to legally go after regime members, such as launching a money laundering case against former Syrian Central Bank governor Adib Mayaleh, who has immunity under international law.
The Syrian government denied in 2013 that it was behind the Ghouta attack, an accusation the opposition rejected as al-Assad’s forces were the only side in the brutal civil war to possess sarin. The US subsequently threatened military retaliation, but Washington settled for a deal with Moscow for al-Assad to give up his chemical weapons’ stockpile.
Activists and human rights group accuse al-Assad of using barrel bombs, torture and massacres to crush opponents.
While Darwish and others plan to press Interpol and Russia to extradite him, they know it is unlikely. However, an arrest warrant issued by France could lay the groundwork for al-Assad’s trial in absentia or potential arrest if he travels outside Russia.
Syrians often took great personal risk to gather evidence of war crimes.
Darwish said that in the aftermath of a chlorine gas attack in Douma, teams collected eyewitness testimonies, images of devastation and soil samples. Others then tracked down and interviewed defectors to build a “chain of command” for the regime’s chemical weapons production and use.
Al-Assad was relatively safe under international law.
Heads of state could not be prosecuted for actions taken during their rule, a rule designed long ago to ease dialogue when leaders needed to travel the world to meet, said lawyer Jeanne Sulzer, who coled the case against al-Assad for the 2013 chemical attack.
“You have to wait until the person is not a sitting in office to be able to prosecute,” she added.
However, that protection has been whittled away over the years by courts ruling that the brutality of former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, former Liberian president Charles Taylor and former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, to name just a few, merited a restructuring of the world’s legal foundations, Open Society Justice Initiative executive director James Goldston said.
The global chemical weapons watchdog has called on the government of Syrian interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa to protect and dismantle al-Assad’s stockpiles.
Darwish is working on 29 cases against al-Assad and other regime figures who have fled to Russia, the Gulf, Lebanon and Europe.
Many Syrians hope al-Assad sits for a fair trial in Syria, he said.
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