Where French court’s arrest warrant for Bashar al-Assad and other Syrian proceedings stand

What impact will the fall of Bashar al-Assad have on ongoing proceedings in France against former Syrian regime officials? According to the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT), which is also responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, “24 proceedings concerning crimes attributed to the [Syrian] regime or its affiliated forces, such as militias, like the National Defense Forces,” were listed in France as of December 1.

Not all these procedures were launched following complaints: Some were initiated by the PNAT, notably after reports from the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, following the refusal of asylum to former members of the regime. Many others are still at the preliminary investigation stage. This is the case of the structural investigation opened in 2015 after the Caesar file, referring to over 50,000 photographers that were smuggled out of Syria by a military defector, was handed over by the then Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius.

Caesar is the codename for the military forensic photographer charged with taking images of the corpses of prisoners who died from bullets, torture, starvation or disease in the jails of the regime’s intelligence services in the Damascus region between 2011 and 2013. The tens of thousands of images identified the bodies of 6,786 detainees, 4,025 civilians killed outside prison and 1,036 executed soldiers.

Even if the Caesar investigation, carried out jointly with the German judiciary, were not to lead to a trial in France, “it could serve to feed the new Syrian authorities if they decide to engage in a transitional justice process,” explained lawyer Clémence Bectarte, who works for the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), a plaintiff in a number of judicial investigations.

Chemical weapons dropped

To date, 13 arrest warrants have been issued in France, including one for Bashar al-Assad, now a refugee in Russia. Only one trial in absentia has taken place to date. In May, it resulted in life sentences for Ali Mamlouk, ex-director of the National Security Bureau, Jamil Hassan, ex-chief of the Air Force Intelligence Service, and Abdel Salam Mahmoud, former head of the Bab Touma branch of Air Force Intelligence, all convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes for the abduction and disappearance of Patrick and Mazen Dabbagh, two French-Syrian citizens, in Damascus in 2013. The court ordered that the arrest warrants issued against them remain in effect. The whereabouts of the three men remain unknown.

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