On 29 June 2023, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution A/77/L.79 to create an Independent Institution on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic. This new institution will have two aims: (1) to clarify the fate and whereabouts of all missing persons in Syria and (2) provide adequate support to victims, survivors and the families of those missing. The task ahead is huge, because, since the conflict started 12 years ago, there are at least 100.000 persons who went missing. This figure encompasses persons whose fate and whereabouts are unknown for multiple reasons, including because they were disappeared. The disappearances are alleged to have been committed by different actors, but most of them by the Syrian State authorities, and as such are enforced disappearances: a grave violation of human rights law and of international humanitarian law and a crime under international criminal law.
Syria
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Could the Lafarge Settlement provide Reparations for Victims of ISIL?
On 18 October 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice agreed to a historic plea deal in the Lafarge proceedings, marking a significant development in the field of corporate accountability and terrorism. In the first ever U.S. prosecution of its kind, the Lafarge corporation (at the time one of the two largest construction companies in the world) and…
Accountability in The Hague: Recent Developments in Dutch Core International Crimes Cases regarding the Syrian Civil War
A month ago, the Dutch War Crimes Unit announced big news: for the first time in the Netherlands, an individual will be prosecuted for a crime committed against the Yazidis (see also here). The recent focus of the Dutch Public Prosecutor on possible crimes committed during the Syrian Civil War has already resulted in four…
There wasn’t before, and now there even more definitely isn’t, any legal barrier to providing cross-border humanitarian assistance in northwest Syria
For three long days following last week’s earthquake in Southern Türkiye, thousands of people in northwest Syria lay trapped under rubble, with no help from the UN. The road through Türkiye to the border crossing between southern Türkiye and northwest Syria, Bab al-Hawa, was damaged. Although, to quote the International Crisis Group’s Syria Analyst Dareen Khalifa,…
One Year On – Remembering the Al-Khatib Syrian Torture Case and Reflecting on the Documentation of International Crimes Cases in German Courts
One year ago, on 13 January 2022, the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz, Germany, convicted Anwar R, a senior member of the Syrian General Intelligence Service, of at least 4,000 cases of torture, the murder of 27 people and multiple cases of sexual violence as a crime against humanity in the context of the infamous Al-Khatib prison…