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On Wednesday, a German court sentenced a former Syrian intelligence soldier to four and a half years in prison after being found guilty of facilitating the torture of 30 prisoners.
With the upcoming 10th anniversary of the start of the popular uprising in Syria on March 15, 2011, this is the first time in the world that a court has issued a verdict in a case related to the brutal and bloody repression by the Syrian President’s regime. . Bashar al-Assad of the protests for freedom that took place in the framework of the “Arab Spring”.
To prosecute him, Germany applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows the perpetrators of the most serious crimes to be tried regardless of their nationality and the place where the crimes occurred.
This case, the first of its kind, provides a place of hope for Syrian refugees in Germany and Europe to end the policy of impunity and allow them to realize their rights and reduce the memory of the violations that forced many of them to emigrate. .
A Syrian lawyer revealed that Iyad al-Gharib, 44, was convicted of arresting at least 30 opposition activists in Douma, the largest city in Eastern Ghouta near Damascus, after a demonstration against Assad and sending them to a intelligence center, knowing that they would be tortured in a detention center. A secret affiliated with the regime and named “Rama 251” or al-Khatib in September and October 2011.
On April 25, 2018, the accused arrived in Germany after a long trip to Turkey and then to Greece, and he had never hidden his past. When he related his arduous journey to the authorities in charge of deciding on his asylum application, he aroused the interest of the German judiciary, which led to his arrest in February 2019.
The prosecution maintains that it was part of a system in which torture was practiced on a large scale.
During the hearings, which lasted ten months, the stranger was silent, hiding his face from the cameras. However, he wrote a letter expressing his grief for the victims.
He cried as he listened to his lawyer demand his innocence, on the pretext that he would have endangered his life and that of his family if he did not follow orders in a system that crushed all intention of disobedience.
German investigations revealed that the accused was under the command of Bashar Al-Assad’s cousin and his close associate, Hafez Makhlouf, known for his ferocity. However, one of the civil prosecutors Patrick Crocker denounced his silence. He said that people “of his rank could be very important in giving us information (about Syrian officials) that we are really targeting, but he decided not to.”
Cases are increasing in the national courts of Germany, Sweden and France at the initiative of Syrian refugees in Europe. It is currently the only possibility to judge the violations committed in Syria with the paralysis of the international judiciary.
More than a dozen Syrians gave testimony about the horrific violations they suffered in Al-Khatib prison.
Some of the witnesses were interviewed without revealing their identities and their faces were hidden, or they were forced to wear a wig for fear of reprisals from family members still in Syria.
For the first time, photographs from the “Caesar file” were shown to the court. A former cameraman for the military police leaked 50,000 photos, risking his life, showing 6,786 Syrian detainees brutally murdered, starved or suffering the effects of torture.
The photos analyzed in court by the forensic pathologist Professor Marcus Rothschild constitute convincing physical evidence.
