BEIRUT, Lebanon – A court in Germany on Wednesday convicted a former Syrian secret police officer of supporting crimes against humanity for his role in arresting and transporting protesters to an interrogation center known for torture for nearly a decade ago.
The accused, Eyad al-Gharib, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. He is the first former Syrian official to be convicted of crimes against humanity, in a case that rights groups viewed as a beacon in an effort to ensure justice for offenses committed during Syria’s civil war.
The conviction ‘is a message to all criminals who are still committing the most heinous crimes in Syria that the time of impunity is over and that you will not find a safe place to go’, said Anwar al-Bunni, a Syrian lawyer and activist, said in a statement.
As the Syrian war approaches its tenth year of existence, the country is damaged by destruction and sinks into a severe economic crisis, with poverty and famine spreading. But President Bashar al-Assad remains in power, following the government’s widespread use of force and torture to quell an uprising that sought to oust him from power.
A sense of hopelessness about achieving justice in Syria or in the International Criminal Court has led right-wing fighters to focus on European courts, many of which are willing to try foreigners for serious crimes under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
The groups regularly work with Syrian refugees in Europe and have identified suspects who also sought refuge in Europe and tracked down witnesses to testify about crimes committed in Syria.
While European courts have previously sentenced low-ranking Syrian soldiers, Wednesday’s case was not only those convicted, but also the amount of information it revealed about the inner workings of the Syrian government’s detention centers, Patrick Kroker said. a senior legal adviser. with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which represented ten co-plaintiffs in the trial.
“I think this is the most important and important thing about this individual,” he said. Kroker said. The co-plaintiffs are civil parties who can join the prosecutors and testify in court under German law, but may also question witnesses.
Mr. Al-Gharib, 44, entered Germany in April 2018 and was arrested along with a more senior Syrian intelligence official, Anwar Raslan, in February 2019.
The two men were executed at the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz in April 2020, but the case of Mr. Al-Gharib was fired this month because the prosecutor no longer had evidence against him. The trial of Mr. Raslan is expected to continue at least until October.
The events in question took place in the early days of the uprising against Mr. Al-Assad, which broke out in 2011 and developed into a civil war. Mr. Al-Gharib told German investigators that he had helped 30 protesters transport them to an interrogation facility known as Branch 251 in the Syrian capital, Damascus. The protesters were beaten on the way there, and he knew they could be tortured after they got there, he said.
Mr. Raslan was a senior officer at the center, who according to prosecutors supervised the torture of at least 4,000 inmates using methods that included beatings, electric shocks, overcrowding and denial of medical care.
To allege that the two men committed crimes against humanity, the prosecutor had to argue that their roles fit in with the Syrian government’s wider system of illegal detention and torture.
The evidence presented included a forensic analysis of tens of thousands of photos of bodies smuggled out of Syria by a police photographer who had run over; Syrian government documents highlighting the chain of command in the security services; and the testimony of a Syrian refugee in Germany who worked at a mass grave for people killed by the government.
German lawyers have tracked down dozens of Syrians in Europe who were detained in the interrogation center against Mr. Raslan to testify.
No witnesses were found who Mr. Al-Gharib is not directly linked to the crimes he is accused of. The primary evidence against him was therefore his own testimony to German investigators.
His state-appointed defense attorneys argued that the testimony of Mr. Al-Gharib should be excluded because he did not know at the time that he was being questioned as a suspect rather than a witness. They also argued that the Syrian government would have punished him if he had not done his job.
The court heard the testimony of Mr. Al-Gharib asserted that his confession had been obtained through torture and that his confession had been obtained through torture. Prosecutors sought a sentence of five years and six months; Al-Gharib’s lawyers have asked for his acquittal.
He has one week to appeal.
Anna Oehmichen, a German lawyer who works with the Open Society Justice Initiative and represents co-plaintiffs against Raslan, said the court’s acceptance of the systemic nature of the crimes, which was necessary for a conviction for crimes against humanity, made the matter important.
“This is a good sign for the world that there is no impunity for offenses committed by members of a ruling regime,” she said after attending Wednesday’s trial.
But Hassan Kansou, a trial monitor at the Syria Justice and Accountability Center who also attended the trial, said he was pessimistic that the sentence would make a big difference, given the extent of the violence in Syria.
“It is symbolic that they sentence one officer, and there may be others, but that will not change anything in Syria,” he said.
Melissa Eddy reported from Berlin at.