Germany Trying Syrian Officials for Crimes Committed in Syria Under Universal Jurisdiction

Monday, January 24, 2022

Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

A German court in Frankfurt has started to hear evidence in a trial involving Syrian state agents accused of murder and torture. This is the second such trial in Germany: on January 13, a Koblenz court convicted former Syrian intelligence official Anwar Raslan to life in prison. He was accused of directing tortures at the Al-Khatib prison in Damascus and was found guilty by the court (he denied all charges). Raslan was arrested on German soil in 2018 after having received asylum there. These cases mark a new tendency – with geopolitical implications.

In Raslan’s case, the judge heard statements from about 50 witnesses. Many atrocities are described as having taken place at Al-Khatib, including sexual violence. The way the trial was conducted has been criticized over its lack of translation into Arabic. Under such conditions, one can only imagine the challenges involved in conducting criminal investigation pertaining to events in a foreign culture during times of internal conflict. Moreover, no transcript emerged from the proceedings. All of this compromises the case’s credibility to some extent.

Raslan’s trial is being hailed nonetheless and described as unprecedented because it amounts to an European court ruling that there was “state-led” torture in Syria – even though Raslan defected his country during a war and sought asylum abroad. One should also keep in mind that in any case it was Mr. Raslan who was convicted and not of course the Syrian state itself. Moreover, German courts have previously dealt with events that took place in other countries, such as crime accusations pertaining to massacres in Rwanda and Congo.

These trials are made possible because German laws recognize universal jurisdiction over some crimes. Under this principle, the usual territorial restraints are simply thought to not apply. The concept can be traced to the Nuremberg Trials organized by the victorious Allies in the aftermath of World War II to prosecute defeated Nazi war criminals.

What is new is the political climate. According to Wolfgang Kaleck, founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), which represented the alleged victims in Raslan’s case, such verdict is an important step towards bigger things: “If you don’t start now, then in 10 years, you cannot get al-Assad or his chief of intelligence because you have no evidence.”

So, even though Raslan himself is a defected middle-ranking officer, his conviction is being applauded by Western media and intelligentsia because there is hope that through the principle of universal jurisdiction someday a German court will be able to judge and to convict higher authorities, perhaps the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad himself. Even though Assad is very popular in his country, in the West he is believed to be responsible for many crimes, so such a scenario is seen by many as natural and desirable. All of this is taking place after Western powers (Germany included) for years armed and funded the most violent terrorist organizations in the Levant as part of their efforts to overthrow Assad.

Without going into the merits of Assad’s administration, and without even going into the merits of universal jurisdiction, one can in any case apply a little legal realism plus some political realism to a thought experiment: it is a well known fact that in January 2020 then US President Donal Trump ordered the illegal assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was in a peace mission. It is hard to imagine Mr. Trump being arrested for that in, say, Kuwait – and being also judged and convicted for this crime by a Kuwaiti court on the basis of universal jurisdiction.

US President Joe Biden by his own admission personally authorized the infamous August 29 drone strike in Kabul that killed only civilians, including seven children. Former US President Barack Obama, in his turn, just like his successors, notoriously refused to prosecute those responsible for several atrocities – including torture and severe sexual abuse – committed at Guantánamo Bay (Cuba), Abu Ghraib (Iraq) and many other military detention facilities and secret CIA-operated bases such as the ones that can be found in Europe to this very day. Moreover, the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or trial at Guantánamo Bay in particular has been declared a violation of international law by the United Nations.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in 2018 that the European countries where such American facilities are based, such as Romania and Lithuania, were complicit in CIA torture, and thereby violated the European prohibition of this practice. Even so, it is hard to imagine a top CIA official being arrested and tried in Cyprus – not to mention a US general or perhaps Mr. Obama himself being arrested in Turkmenistan.

Or President Biden, for that matter. If anything remotely similar to that happened, regardless of the legal merit, the US would certainly react and retaliate. It would perhaps declare war or not even bother to do so and just bomb the country, as it has done time and time again. Typically, Washington engages in “extended military engagement”, or “systematic campaigns” – technically, the last time the US Congress declared war was in 1942, against the Axis. Be as it may, it would respond.

It is no wonder a 2004 ECCHR criminal complaint (related to torture) filed in Germany on behalf of four Iraqi survivors against former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director George Tenet was simply not taken up by the German prosecutors. In some cases, extra-legal issues might explain some reluctance to open cases at the discretion of prosecutors, as the political cost is certainly considered too.

The point is that the way a country’s judicial systems’ universal jurisdiction can be exercised depends on certain conditions pertaining to political, economic, and military power. Germany, a NATO country, is expanding reach in its universal jurisdiction persecutions – the geopolitical implications of it should be thusly analyzed.

Source: InfoBrics