MidEast

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Landmark Spanish Suit Could Hold Syrian Officials Accountable for Torture, Murder

A judge on Spain’s national court agreed on Monday to hear a complaint that could hold senior members of the Syrian regime accountable for severe human rights abuses.

The suit was filed by the sister of a Syrian delivery van driver who was jailed, tortured, and killed in one of the regime’s detention centers in 2013, two years after the onset of the country’s ongoing civil war, The New York Times reported. Amal, the sister of the Syrian driver identified only as Abdul, runs a beauty salon in Madrid and filed the case against nine high-ranking members of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s security apparatus.

If the court finds the defendants guilty, they may be arrested when traveling internationally and have their foreign assets seized, the Times reported.

“It starts a process of accountability,” said Stephen J. Rapp, the former United States ambassador at large for the Office of Global Criminal Justice, who helped file the case. “We could have international arrest warrants in a month or two against these individuals.”

Among those Syrian officials named in the suit are Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa, a former foreign minister; Ali Mamlouk, head of the National Security Bureau; Gen. Jamil Hassan, head of air force intelligence; and other officers who ran the prison where Abdul was incarcerated and killed.

Lawyers working in London and Madrid with Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers, which represents Abdul’s sister, said that the case “will specifically allow the courts to investigate the torture and execution of thousands of civilians in the illegal detention centers” operated by the Assad regime.

The suit represents “accelerating efforts in Europe to bypass the political obstacles that have thwarted access to other international justice remedies for crimes committed in Syria’s war,” according to the Times.

Russia refuses to allow the United Nations Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court, hindering efforts to force the Assad regime to face legal consequences for its human rights abuses.

A variety of international organizations have already faulted Assad and his government for their well-documented brutality.

Amnesty International charged in February that at least 13,000 people were killed in Assad’s prisons in the first five years of the civil war.

The UN formally accused Assad last year of authorizing the “extermination” of prisoners.

The New Yorker also reported in April 2016 on the Commission for International Justice and Accountability’s (CIJA) work to help establish the culpability of the high-ranking Assad regime officials who authorize war crimes.

The documentation and testimony being gathered by CIJA has been supplemented by photographs of the regime’s thousands of torture and murder victims, which were smuggled out of Syria by a former military police photographer known as Caesar.

Rapp, then the top war crimes official for the U.S. government, declared in July 2014 that Caesar’s photographs provided “solid evidence of the kind of machinery of cruel death that we haven’t seen frankly since the Nazis.”

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution last March calling for a tribunal to prosecute Assad and his allies for war crimes. The non-binding measure denounced a litany of crimes perpetrated by the Assad regime, including having committed “widespread torture and rape, employed starvation as a weapon of war, and massacred civilians, including through the use of chemical weapons, cluster munitions, and barrel bombs;… [and] subjected nearly 1 million civilians to devastating sieges and manipulated the delivery of humanitarian aid for its own gain, thereby weaponizing starvation against populations.”

The resolution notably cast blame on the Assad government, as well as “the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Iran’s terrorist proxies including Hezbollah,” for killing the “vast majority” of Syrian civilians who have died in the conflict.

The UN stopped counting the death toll of the Syrian civil war in 2014, when it had reached 250,000.

[Photo: Adam Miller / YouTube ]