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Due to the Russo-Chinese refusal, UN efforts to refer the file of war crimes in Syria to the International Criminal Court failed. As an alternative, the UN commissioner, Michel Bachelet, called on the countries of the world to prosecute those suspected of having committed war crimes in Syria, as was the case in Germany.
Michelle Bachelet, United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, today, Thursday (March 11, 2021), urged the countries of the world to accelerate the pace of the trials of alleged perpetrators of war crimes in Syria in their national courts, with the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of the Syrian conflict.
Bachelet said attempts to refer the atrocities committed in Syria to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for the perpetrators to face trial were unsuccessful. Therefore, the alternative, in his opinion, became for several countries in the world to facilitate trials on their lands for those suspected of having committed crimes in Syria, as Germany did.
Intensification of efforts to find out the fate of the missing
Bachelet also called for increased efforts to track tens of thousands of missing people, which he said included being held in prisons run by government forces across Syria.
“We owe it to these victims to ensure that the next decade is a contract of liability and compensation, while addressing their rights and needs so that they can rebuild their lives,” the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement.
Democratic protests against the totalitarian government of President Bashar al-Assad’s family erupted in March 2011 in southern Syria before authorities faced them with a harsh security crackdown. But it quickly spread across the country and turned into a multilateral war that also displaced more than 11 million people, representing half of the pre-war population.
The forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, with the support of Iran and Russia, have retaken many places that were once under the control of opposition factions and Islamic militants, but the war still continues in some corners of Syria.
Many war crime suspects are believed to have fled Syria.
Germany leads trials
Last month, a German court sentenced a former member of the Syrian security services to four and a half years in prison for inciting the torture of civilians, in the first such court ruling for crimes against humanity in the war of Syria.
“It remains imperative that national courts continue to conduct fair, public and transparent trials and reduce the accountability gap for such serious crimes,” Bachelet said. She described the German ruling as “an important step forward on the road to justice.”
The Assad government has denied many of the UN’s previous war crime allegations and says it does not torture prisoners.
A UN official denounces the persistence of impunity
For his part, Paulo Pinheiro, who heads a United Nations team to investigate war crimes, denounced the persistence of impunity.
“We commend the great courage … of Syrian victims and activists, and the determination of some member states to investigate the cases,” Pinheiro told the Human Rights Council.
Hani Majali, a member of a United Nations international committee, said 60 judicial systems had contacted the committee, requesting information, and that it had provided information on some 300 cases under consideration.
Delegates from the International Committee of the Red Cross visit inmates in Syria’s central jails, but cannot visit unofficial sites. The commission’s findings are kept confidential.
“It is clear that detention is one of these central issues, and every day we try to work first to improve the conditions of detention and second to expand the range of sites that can be entered”, Fabrizio Carboni, regional director of the committee in the Middle East, he told Reuters.
PM / AH (Reuters)
