What will be the impact of the fall of Bashar Al-Assad on the ongoing procedures in France against former officials of the Syrian regime? According to the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT), also responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocides, “twenty-four proceedings relating to crimes attributed to the regime [syrien] or its affiliated forces – such as militias, such as the National Defense Forces”are recorded in France on the date of 1is December.
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Not all of these procedures were launched following complaints – some were opened at the initiative of the PNAT, in particular after reports from the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, following asylum refusals. to former members of the regime – and many of them are still at the preliminary investigation stage. This is the case of the structural investigation opened in 2015 after the transmission of the César file by the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Laurent Fabius.
César is a military forensic photographer, who remained anonymous, responsible for taking images of the corpses of prisoners who died from bullets, torture, hunger 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 made it possible to identify the bodies of 6,786 detainees, 4,025 civilians killed outside prison and 1,036 executed soldiers.
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Even if the César investigation, carried out jointly with the German justice system, does not lead to a trial in France, “it could be used to feed the new Syrian authorities if they decide to engage in a transitional justice process”explains lawyer Clémence Bectarte, who works for the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), civil party in a number of judicial investigations.
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So far, judicial investigations opened in France have resulted in the issuance of thirteen arrest warrants, including one targeting Bashar Al-Assad, now a refugee in Russia. Only one default trial has taken place to date. It led, in May, to the sentencing to life imprisonment of Ali Mamlouk, former director of the national security office, of Jamil Hassan, former head of the intelligence services of the air force , and Abdel Salam Mahmoud, former head of the Bab Touma branch of air force intelligence, all found guilty of complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes for the kidnapping and disappearance of Patrick and Mazen Dabbagh, two Franco-Syrian citizens, in 2013, in Damascus. The court ordered that the effects of the arrest warrants issued against them be maintained. No one knows where the three men are to this day.
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