by Wolfgang Kaleck, General Secretary
"The eternity is over," says our colleague, the Syrian human rights defender Joumana Seif, on the first day after the collapse of the Assad regime. Seif, who is also the 2023 Anne Klein Prize winner, has been working with us at ECCHR for almost eight years on our largest single project to date: to bring those responsible for the torture regime in Syria to justice. For 54 years, the country has lived under the paralyzing dominion of a family dictatorship. It systematically plundered Syrian society, while petrifying it into a culture of fear. It combined the corruption of former Soviet republics with a chinese-style police surveillance apparatus.
Now, in the aftermath of liberation, the investigation, documentation and legal processing of the state crimes of the Assad regime will have enormous influence on the construction of a future democratic Syria. For the last 13 years, Syrian activists, lawyers and survivors have been working together tirelessly with an international network of civil society organizations – including ECCHR – to make this happen. National criminal justice authorities in third countries have gathered massive quantities of evidence. Pioneering trials under the principle of universal jurisdiction have already taken place, and the United Nations have established two mechanisms specifically tasked with investigating atrocities.
Ultimately, this is about thousands and thousands of disappeared people, systematic torture, undocumented mass graves, and war crimes ranging from the use of poison gas to massacres of the civilian population. But this is also about the chains of command of those responsible, the state torturers, as well as – albeit to a much lesser extent – the self-appointed executioners of various militias. Now, for the first time, it is possible to travel to Syria and gain access to the crime scenes and to most of the perpetrators.
We are already discussing with our Syrian partner organizations how we can support Syrians in initiating a sustainable process for legal accountability and coming to terms with the past. Given the decades of horror, there is no question that this will be a long road. Now is the time to take the first steps in Syria to ensure that questions of justice are in the hands of Syrians themselves. But we will of course also continue to pursue our cases with German, French, Norwegian, Swedish and Austrian prosecution authorities. And depending on the course of developments in Syria and in consultation with Syrian human rights activists, we will become active in other forums.
As Joumana Seif put it: "Now we want to see what we have been fighting for all these years: a democratic country with equal citizenship for all, where people's rights, their dignity and their civil rights are protected. That is the dream we will continue to fight for." With your help, we will work to make this a reality.
More on our work on Syria |
