KOBLENZ, Germany (CN) — A German court in the small, southwestern city of Koblenz convicted a senior Syrian official on Thursday for crimes against humanity for the murder and torture of political prisoners during the Syrian Civil War.
Anwar Raslan was given the maximum sentence of life in prison for overseeing 58 murders, the torture of at least 4,000 people, and forced detention and rape at the infamous military intelligence facility known as “Branch 251” in the country’s capital Damascus.
The 58-year-old ex-colonel had denied all of the charges and instead claims he did everything in his power to protect the lives of Branch 251 detainees following the 2011 political uprising. Prosecutors charged him with crimes from the start of the revolution in April 2011 until he fled the country in September 2012.
Landmark trial
Syrians and journalists began lining up in the dark, early morning hours on Thursday to watch the announcement of the historic verdict. Fifty survivors testified over 107 days of hearings, describing how when upon arrival at the prison, they were subjected to a “welcoming party” where guards beat and kicked them. Detainees were packed into crowded cells, raped, hung from the ceiling by their wrists and had their fingernails ripped out. Several described meeting Raslan personally and said that, from his office, he could hear the screams of prisoners as they were being tortured.
“This day, this verdict is important for all Syrians who have suffered and are still suffering from the Assad regime’s crimes. It shows us: justice should and must not remain a dream for us,” one of the survivors, Ruham Hawash, who testified at the trial said in a statement following the announcement of the verdict.
Under German law, Raslan will be allowed to have his sentence reviewed after 15 years. Prosecutors had asked judges to waive this option, citing the exceptional gravity of the case, but that request was denied.
The trial opened in April 2020 and initially included a second defendant, Eyad al-Gharib. The trial of the former intelligence officer was eventually split off for procedural reasons and al-Gharib became the first Syrian official to be convicted when he was sentenced in 2021 to four-and-a-half years in prison for aiding crimes against humanity. He is appealing his verdict.
Universal jurisdiction
Applying a legal concept known as universal jurisdiction, German law allows for the prosecution of certain serious crimes, like crimes against humanity and genocide, even if the events do not occur within the countries borders. “There should be no safe haven anywhere in the world for these people,” said Patrick Kroker, legal adviser at the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, in an interview.
The principal has existed for centuries, originating the prosecution of piracy during the Roman Empire, and has been used by several European countries to bring war criminals to account. Victims of the Syrian regime have limited legal avenues for justice. Assad is unlikely to prosecute himself or his supporters, Syria is not a member of the International Criminal Court, and attempts at the United Nations to establish an ad hoc tribunal, like the courts created to prosecute crimes from the 1994 Rwandan Genocide or the Bosnia Wars, have been blocked for political reasons by Russia and China.
A chance encounter
Before his 2019 arrest, Raslan was seen as a valuable member of the opposition. His position in the regime was high enough that opposition leaders helped him defect in 2012, traveling to Jordan with his family before eventually settling in Germany in 2014. He even appeared at U.N.-organized peace talks in Geneva. According to other opposition activists, however, once he was living in Germany, he was unwilling to help the cause. Several prominent members of the opposition, including Wael al-Khalid, who helped Raslan defect, told Foreign Policy that Raslan never turned over promised information and documents.
In 2017, the ECCHR, Kroker’s organization, filed a criminal complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor against six Syrian officials, including Raslan, who were thought to be living in Germany. Several years prior, Syrian human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni saw Raslan near a refugee center and recognized him as the man who had once arrested him.
Raslan was already on the radar of German authorities. In 2015, Raslan walked into a Berlin police station to report that he believed regime officials were following him. He even signed the report using his military title of colonel. The prosecution would eventually use both his statements given regarding the alleged intimidation and those that he made during his asylum hearings.
“More than 10 years after the violations were committed in Syria, the German court’s verdict is a long-awaited beacon of hope that justice can and will in the end prevail,” Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
Language barriers
Although many Syrians are happy to see a regime official facing justice, victims and human rights organizations have leveled a number of complaints about the court process itself. Unlike how trials are conducted at international courts, such as the International Criminal Court, Germany's court has not translated any of the proceedings into Arabic, leaving many victims with no understanding of the proceedings. In response to pressure from human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, the court on Thursday did read a statement in Arabic.
Courts in Germany do not record proceedings unless the case is of particular interest to German history, a designation judges have refused to give this case. That means, unlike the famed Nuremberg trials after World War II, where Allied forces tried hundreds of Nazi officials, no transcript or recording will exist for reference by victims or scholars.
Assad is watching
A decade after the conflict first broke out, Syria is much quieter. Assad’s regime has regained control of most of the country. “We know that the Syrian regime is following what is happening in Koblenz,” ECCHR research fellow Joumana Seif told reporters ahead of the trial. In a since-deleted interview with Russian state-controlled media outlet RT, Assad denied there were widespread human rights violations in Syria. “We never believed that torture could make the situation better as a regime, very simple. So we don't use it,” he said.
“One decade in, the parties to the conflict continue to perpetrate war crimes and crimes against humanity and infringing the basic human rights of Syrians. The war on Syrian civilians continues,” UN Syria Commission of Inquiry Paulo Pinheiro said at a meeting in October 2021. The conflict has left more than half a million people dead and some 12 million displaced.
Next week before a court in Frankfurt, the trial against another Syrian man, Alaa A., will open. His name is withheld for privacy reasons. He’s been charged with crimes against humanity for allegedly torturing patients while working as a doctor at a military hospital.
Follow @mollyquell
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
