{"id":42946,"date":"2026-03-30T13:18:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T13:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/42946\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T13:18:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T13:18:13","slug":"syrian-led-accountability-efforts-cannot-function-in-isolation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/42946\/","title":{"rendered":"Syrian-Led Accountability Efforts Cannot Function in Isolation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The conflict in Syria is one of the most documented in modern history. From citizen journalists<\/a> to local<\/a> activists<\/a>, international NGOs<\/a> to official investigative<\/a> mechanisms, the amount of information collected on war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict is unprecedented. For years, however, the avenues for turning this documentation into tangible action for accountability remained extremely limited. The fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s regime in December 2024 has changed this picture dramatically. Yet for the pursuit of accountability to be successful, justice actors both inside and outside Syria need a groundswell of innovative support for many years to come. Effective existing initiatives, as well as some promising new efforts, provide concrete examples of the kind of targeted, practical tools that can help chip away at the myriad accountability needs borne from the Syrian conflict.<\/p>\n

Throughout the long conflict in Syria, justice inside the country was impossible on account of Assad\u2019s seemingly interminable hold on power. Outside Syria, the route to the International Criminal Court (ICC) was also closed; Syria is not a party to the Rome Statute, and a 2014 effort<\/a> by some members of the United Nations Security Council to refer Syria to the ICC was vetoed by Russia and China. With these domestic and international avenues unavailable, the few successful prosecutions achieved in European domestic systems<\/a> under the principle of universal jurisdiction only underscored the challenges faced by survivors seeking accountability.<\/p>\n

Once Assad fell, however, the new authorities in Syria quickly signaled transitional justice as a priority to address the legacy of war crimes and human rights violations. Under interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, this commitment has been translated into various efforts \u2014 the creation of transitional justice bodies, including a National Commission for Transitional Justice<\/a>; the re-instatement<\/a> of judges who fled the Assad regime; and the initiation<\/a> of domestic prosecutions.<\/p>\n

Yet Syria\u2019s justice system faces deep structural and practical barriers that will take years to overcome: Core international crimes are still not fully incorporated into national legislation; courts and prosecutors lack experience<\/a> with complex atrocity cases; and the judiciary itself remains overstretched<\/a>, unevenly vetted, and not yet<\/a> fully independent. Early prosecutions have focused largely on former Assad regime officials, leaving crimes committed by other actors outside current mandates. Fair trial safeguards, impartiality, and due process guarantees remain fragile in a system rebuilt amid political fragmentation.<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that there is a move afoot to push the new authorities in Syria to join the ICC<\/a> and grant retroactive jurisdiction to the Court under an Article 12(3) declaration. This is a worthy initiative provided no one deludes themselves that having a court in The Hague pursuing a few high-profile perpetrators over the coming decade can in any way quench the thirst for accountability stemming from a conflict that ran for almost 14 years.<\/p>\n

Distributing the Accountability Workload <\/p>\n

The world over, it is survivors who drive and sustain accountability efforts. This is one of the many reasons why it makes sense for accountability efforts to be locally led. Yet the mechanisms for doing so cannot be stood up overnight. For the foreseeable future, actors outside Syria have an important role to play, both in supporting accountability efforts inside Syria, and in distributing the prosecutorial workload beyond its borders.<\/p>\n

One existing initiative that has long worked well to strengthen coordination across domestic jurisdictions are joint investigative teams<\/a> (JITs). Such JITs have traditionally been used to support prosecutions of transnational crimes occurring in Europe, supported by Europol<\/a> and Eurojust<\/a>. Through bilateral agreements with the new Syrian government, however, their geographic scope could be expanded to reach atrocities committed in Syria, thereby improving the transnational coordination needed to prosecute these cases under universal jurisdiction in Europe. The JIT<\/a> created for addressing core international crimes committed in Ukraine could serve as a useful replicable model.<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, specialized war crimes units<\/a> are already nested within nearly a dozen domestic jurisdictions. If domestic prosecutors, international criminal investigators, and other justice actors globally were committed to sharing the prosecutorial workload arising from the conflict in Syria, new units could be set up inside States keen to pursue universal jurisdiction cases through their domestic courts, and existing units could be vested with additional resources and expertise specific to Syria.<\/p>\n

In addition to expanding and strengthening existing mechanisms, new tools also have a role to play. Best practice initiatives recently undertaken by the international community \u2014 through the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI) and the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), will be important to integrate into the upcoming transitional justice processes within Syria. And new initiatives, such as those led by InterJust<\/a>, an organization that one of us (Anya) founded and for which the other (Rebecca) is a Justice Ambassador, offer a window into the scope for innovation when thinking how to support Syrian accountability efforts.<\/p>\n

The Murad Code<\/a>, spear-headed by the IICI<\/a>, provides transitional justice actors, including those using the kind of open-source digital evidence so prevalent in the Syrian context, with a code of conduct for working with survivors of systematic and conflict-related sexual violence. (It\u2019s named after Nobel Peace laureate, human rights activist, and Yezidi sexual assault survivor Nadia Murad and established in collaboration with her Nadia\u2019s Initiative<\/a>. Available in Arabic here<\/a>). In collaboration with the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law School, the Code is accompanied by a practitioners\u2019 guide that draws on the experience of experts and survivors of such violence. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, all those engaged in accountability efforts in Syria now have this ready-made repository of best practices to draw on when seeking to prosecute these crimes. Making use of the Murad Code and supporting materials, increases the likelihood that the survivors of these crimes will be spared re-traumatization<\/a>, and that they will see the effective impact of accountability efforts.<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, the Bournemouth Protocol on Mass Grave Protection<\/a>, supported by the ICMP, draws on the experience of forensic experts, investigators, judges, prosecutors, and police, gained in the decades since the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The protocol addresses not only the forensic aspects of evidence collection in a mass grave setting, but also the myriad psycho-social concerns that arise for family members of the deceased. In Syria, over 60 mass grave sites<\/a> have been discovered since the fall of the Assad regime.<\/p>\n

Initiatives like the Bournemouth Protocol work best when paired with hands-on training, and encouragingly, this is already underway in Syria. This past summer, the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala<\/a>, which gained its expertise in relation to searching for those disappeared in the Guatemalan Civil War, led a training course for Syrians<\/a> in Damascus.<\/p>\n

New Tools<\/p>\n

One new tool, Interjust\u2019s Project Meridian<\/a>, seeks to put user-friendly guidance on potential venues for pursuing prosecutions into the hands of Syrian survivors, civil society, lawyers, and even State authorities. To date, most universal jurisdiction cases have been pursued within a few European countries. Yet, the possible venues for such cases extend much further. Using an interactive online tool that maps universal jurisdiction laws across 216 countries and territories, Project Meridian offers a practical guide to where Syrian cases can be investigated and prosecuted abroad and under what conditions. For each of the jurisdictions, the tool tracks 45 characteristics related to that jurisdiction\u2019s laws and practices on investigating and prosecuting atrocity crimes, including substantive criminal provisions, jurisdictional, and procedural provisions. This helps activists and lawyers identify which jurisdictions are viable for specific cases and how they can be filed and progressed in each country.<\/p>\n

A jurisdictional roadmap of this kind is particularly relevant in the Syrian context in instances where the perpetrators or victims are currently located in countries other than Syria, where cases could be filed directly, or for potential \u201cabsolute\u201d universal jurisdiction cases (where there are no jurisdictional limitations) brought against perpetrators who are currently out of reach (for example, in Russia), but against whom arrest warrants could be obtained for future prosecutions. This kind of structured and constantly updated global accountability map can help complement domestic justice efforts with international action.<\/p>\n

Expanding the range of venues in which Syrian cases can be brought is important given the sheer number of atrocities committed. Yet finding a venue with jurisdiction counts for nothing without meticulously prepared cases based on a strong evidentiary record. In this respect, both domestic and distributed efforts face the challenge posed by the enormous volumes of documentation. The United Nations Independent Impartial Investigative Mechanism (IIIM)<\/a> for Syria, for example, has collected 280 terabytes<\/a> of documentation since it was established in December 2016; to give a sense of scale, if that data was transformed into video, it would provide footage that would play nonstop for more than 22 years. The evidentiary infrastructure needed to authenticate, preserve, and use this scale of material is still in its infancy. Without careful management, there is a real risk that these troves of documentation \u2014 videos, photographs, documents, survivor testimonies \u2014 will remain unusable or legally fragile.<\/p>\n

One promising effort in this space involves a new platform, designed by RedLine Discovery<\/a> and\u00a0 supported by InterJust, built to provide secure intake, metadata preservation, verification workflows, chain-of-custody safeguards, and a user-friendly interface built for civil society and field investigators. These features address precisely the challenges faced by all actors involved in accountability efforts for Syria: inconsistent documentation practices, the threat of digital manipulation, and the difficulty of aligning grassroots evidence with courtroom standards. The platform is currently undergoing final testing and fine-tuning, and will become widely available for civil society actors in 2026.<\/p>\n

Compounding the challenges of preserving and organizing vast amounts of evidence, is the fact that many alleged perpetrators of atrocities committed in Syria \u2014 whether former regime officials, militia commanders, or ISIS operatives \u2014 are now outside Syria\u2019s borders. Neither Syrian courts, nor other jurisdictions can effectively prosecute suspects they cannot apprehend, (and in-absentia trials cannot deliver justice in the same way). Another newly developed InterJust tool, Project Arya<\/a>, is helping fill that void by building real-time systems for locating fugitives, analyzing their travel, networks, and assets, and facilitating information-sharing with national authorities capable of making arrests. For Syrian authorities as well as other law enforcement agencies involved in investigating crimes committed in Syria, such tools provide a blueprint for ensuring that arrest warrants do not remain symbolic, and that accountability is not limited by geography.<\/p>\n

The myriad challenges to the pursuit of accountability discussed above do not diminish the centrality of Syrian-led efforts. Rather, they underscore the importance of supplementing and supporting it through tools, protocols, systems, and training aimed at reinforcing the global international justice infrastructure for the benefit of Syrians and so many others around the world seeking accountability. The protocols and tools described above are examples of practical mechanisms for making that connection work in real time \u2014 translating hard-earned best practice protocols into Syrian investigations, supporting peer-to-peer training, mapping where cases can proceed, locating those responsible, and safeguarding the evidence needed to hold them to account. Syria\u2019s transition does not occur in isolation, and its justice process will depend on how well domestic efforts connect with the global accountability landscape.<\/p>\n

FEATURED IMAGE: France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot and his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock visit the Saydnaya prison north of Damascus, accompanied by members of Syrian rescuers known as the ‘White Helmets’ on January 3, 2025. Baerbock and Barrot visited Syria’s Saydnaya prison, an emblem of abuses under deposed leader Bashar al-Assad. Barrot\u2019s was the first high-level visit by a major Western power since Assad was ousted in December 2024. (Photo by ANWAR AMRO\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The conflict in Syria is one of the most documented in modern history. From citizen journalists to local…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2749,18162,1613,18163,95,15323,6101,18164,2773],"class_list":{"0":"post-42946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-syria","8":"tag-accountability","9":"tag-atrocities-mass-atrocities","10":"tag-bashar-al-assad","11":"tag-international-cooperation","12":"tag-syria","13":"tag-syria-in-transition","14":"tag-transitional-justice","15":"tag-universal-jurisdiction","16":"tag-war-crimes"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116318326492093342","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}