Late one evening in January 2013, a group of men carrying Kalashnikov rifles approached another man. Their faces were hidden behind balaclavas and they smelled of alcohol. It was the height of the Syrian civil war, and the group of men were supporters of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. They arrested the man and handed him over to Syrian Air Force intelligence officials who detained and tortured him.
A Dutch court recently convicted one of those masked men involved in the arrest, known in court papers as Mustafa A., of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The verdict is the first time that a Dutch court has convicted a defendant who supported Assad’s regime during the civil war, and it is the latest example of how courts across Europe are playing an active role in holding perpetrators of atrocity crimes to account.
Joining the show to discuss the case and its implications are Fritz Streiff and Hope Rikkelman. Fritz and Hope work with The Nuhanovic Foundation, a nonprofit organization which helps to secure justice and reparations for civilian victims of war and conflict. The Foundation played an active role in this case.
Show Notes:
Late one evening in January 2013, a group of men carrying Kalashnikov rifles approached another man. Their faces were hidden behind balaclavas and they smelled of alcohol. It was the height of the Syrian civil war, and the group of men were supporters of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. They arrested the man and handed him over to Syrian Air Force intelligence officials who detained and tortured him.
A Dutch court recently convicted one of those masked men involved in the arrest, known in court papers as Mustafa A., of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The verdict is the first time that a Dutch court has convicted a defendant who supported Assad’s regime during the civil war, and it is the latest example of how courts across Europe are playing an active role in holding perpetrators of atrocity crimes to account.
Joining the show to discuss the case and its implications are Fritz Streiff and Hope Rikkelman. Fritz and Hope work with The Nuhanovic Foundation, a nonprofit organization which helps to secure justice and reparations for civilian victims of war and conflict. The Foundation played an active role in this case.
Show Notes:
Paras Shah: Late one evening in January 2013, a group of men carrying Kalashnikov rifles approached another man. Their faces were hidden behind balaclavas, and they smelled of alcohol. It was the height of the Syrian civil war, and the group of men were supporters of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. They arrested the man and handed him over to Syrian Air Force intelligence officials, who detained and tortured him.
A Dutch court recently convicted one of those masked men involved in the arrest, known in court papers as Mustafa A., of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The verdict is the first time that a Dutch court has convicted a defendant who supported Assad’s regime during the civil war, and it is the latest example of how courts across Europe are playing an active role in holding perpetrators of atrocity crimes to account.
This is the Just Security Podcast. I’m your host, Paras Shah.
Joining the show to discuss the case and its implications are Fritz Streiff and Hope Rikkelman. Fritz and Hope work with The Nuhanovic Foundation, a nonprofit organization which helps to secure justice and reparations for civilian victims of war and conflict. The Foundation played an active role in this case.
Paras Shah: Hi, Fritz. Hi, Hope. Thank you so much for joining the show. Welcome.
Fritz Streiff: All right, yeah, it's good to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Hope Rikkelman: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Paras: Yeah, pleasure to have you, and thank you so much for joining to talk about this important case that has recently come down in the Netherlands. To get us started, could you tell us about the victim in this case? What happened to him during the Syrian civil war?
Fritz: So, this is, as any of the cases that have gone to trial in European courts regarding the Syrian civil war and will still go to trial for a long time, you know, it's really, I think, a prime example of how it's just like a small puzzle piece of the whole story. Every story has its own, you know, profile. In this case, we're talking about a Palestinian refugee camp just outside of Aleppo, the Al Neirab camp, one of those camps that has been there for decades, of course, and has sort of morphed into a village.
And when the uprising started in Syria, sooner or later, it also arrived in the Aleppo region, and this was, you know, various groups really taking to the streets and demonstrating against the regime of Bashar Al Assad, the president of Syria who had inherited the presidency from his father, Hafez Al Assad, that had been a dictator there for decades. The uprising became more and more violent and developed into a civil war. And that is kind of the framework in which the facts of this case occurred in late 2012 and early 2013.
The victim in this case is a man of Palestinian origin. At the time of the facts, he was in his late 50s. So now he's in his late 60s. He now lives in Sweden, and what's now been published also in the courts decision, he was active in sort of the NGO committee within the camp that was trying to keep the neutrality of the camp when the war started, especially the youth in the camp outside of the conflict. That's what we know of the victim and that's also, you know, part of the reason we believe he was targeted.
Paras: Another important dimension of this case is the role that the Syrian community across Europe played in actually getting it off the ground. What role did civil society play in this case?
Hope: Yeah, I think it's a very broad role and an extremely important role. If you look at these cases, specifically, one thing that, you know, they do amazingly is their outreach to the Syrian community and the broader community. It is extremely well, right? They’re accessible. People, especially Syrians, know where to find them, and they have this trustworthy relationship with civil society organizations, collecting evidence, documenting, and then on the other hand, that is the relationship than with the Syrian community. On the other hand, these NGOs, doing this kind of work, they build trustworthy relationships with the war crimes units and different mechanisms in order to make sure that this evidence is collected and is eventually able to be used in courts. I think playing that role is essential in really kind of transforming the process from, you know, individual, evidential facts to actual cases.
Paras: One of the other unique features of this case is the fact that the public prosecutor's office actually took a number of steps to request measures that increased access to participation, both from victims and the general public. So, what were some of those measures? What did they look like?
Fritz: I think the prosecutor's office here deserves mentioning that, you know, we have worked with from an angle of civil society for many years to increase these types of, what we find very important, elements of this type of domestic international criminal procedure, right? Active victim participation to enable that more, enabling access to the courtroom for the general public, especially in this case that of the Syrian general public.
We can go into how that was eventually done, but to compare with other cases that are going on in other countries, some of you listeners might know the groundbreaking historic case in Koblenz in Germany, which saw the first criminal trial against Syrian regime officials starting 2020. And it all happened during the pandemic, which definitely didn't help. But, the court showed very little, too close to none flexibility in terms of enabling access to the courtroom and to the proceedings for the general public. There was no access to translations into Arabic for those in the public gallery. When you talk about victim participation, that was definitely a highlight, I think, in Koblenz. There was a lot of victims that participated officially.
Now, going back to our case, maybe, Hope, you want to you want to describe how we, I think, did take those lessons also from, you know, from other cases abroad and try to together with the prosecutor in coordination, in communication also, with our Syrian civil society partners, how we successfully managed to put that into place in this case in The Hague?
Hope: Absolutely. I think, you know, if you explain it sounds very easy, but actually, it was kind of a process, right? We supported the fact and outreach to the community and telling them and explaining that the case, the trial, and the verdict would be translated. So, there was online access with translation. And I think that was extremely important in, you know, having this proactive and access to the courts be facilitated by the public prosecutor's office, and also the court itself. So, what we really did there was have a coordination role, or coordinating role, in facilitating that access. So, we made sure that that link, or at least the registration of the link, was available, and making sure that, you know, our networks, our partners, our contacts, the Syrian contacts, and all of the groups that everybody was in, we really did our best to make sure that that was visible and that, you know, everybody was able to register.
I think, you know, the other thing that we, in addition to that, did was an answer-and-question to kind of give that oversight, which was also translated. So, I think, you know, having our press release, having our own statements and communications, everything that went out, making sure that that was available in Arabic as well, was also an added value to having access to information and having access to the court and the case itself.
Paras: Those are such great steps, and they really do show the power of technology and how it can be used to increase access to courts and access to justice. Can this be a model for other jurisdictions? Should other courts be looking to this as precedent they can use in their own cases?
Hope: Yeah, absolutely. I think in terms of these cases also being international crimes cases, the suspects, but also the survivors and victims and witnesses, are from across the world, right? So having access to that through a simple online link, which is a daily part of our lives nowadays, is something that I think is, shouldn't be missed within these trials, It should be something that should be always incorporated if you do, you know, consider access to justice for survivors and victims in their communities.
Fritz: And it's not that, you know, it's not that that hard. I think what the court here has shown is that there are ways to safeguard the privacy and the security of anybody that wants to participate through a video stream link, and at the same time, open that possibility for anybody that is interested to dial in from anywhere in the world.
Hope: Yeah, maybe just one thing to add on to that is that we saw that our communication around this case, specifically, and the registrations, were from across the world, and a lot that were from the region. So, I think that that was also one of our kind of target groups, and for us a successful outcome to see that it actually was Syrians that registered to have online access, to listen to the case and that actually also used the interpretation possibility.
We are in touch with quite a few Syrians here in the Netherlands. So, for them to actually physically go to the court, be seen there, is also, you know, could potentially be a security risk. So, for them to be able to have a safe link to watch within the safety of their own home was an added value of the online access to the case.
Paras: Right, that type of online access has so many benefits. There's all types of reasons why folks might not want to attend in person, but they can still get access to the proceedings.
This is the first time that an individual who supported the Assad regime has been convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and there have been other prosecutions in the Netherlands of opposition groups and other armed groups. What does this verdict mean for the victim and for this Syrian community?
Fritz: I mean, it means so much. And just before we entered the courtroom, to hear the announcement of the decision, I was talking to two of our key, you know, Syrian partners in this, and they were also zooming in on this element, which is, of course, it's an individual case. And it's one of those, you know, many puzzle pieces that when you put them together, you get a picture of the entire, very complex landscape of atrocity crimes that have occurred in Syria.
But it's also, because the indictment included the, you know, the charge of crimes against humanity, it's also, in an indirect sense, an indictment of the Syrian regime itself, because to prove that the acts of the accused took place within the framework, or as a crime against humanity, the prosecutor had to prove — and the judges in this case accepted — the evidence that the accused committed these individual acts as part of a widespread or systematic attack against the civilian population, which can logically only be perpetrated by the regime itself. And so, the fact that the court accepted the charge as indicted of the individual acts as having been committed as crimes against humanity really means a lot to all Syrian victims and survivors. You could feel that and you could see that. You could see also the relief in our Syrian partners’ faces when this was indeed confirmed by the court.
Hope: I'm in some Syrian groups, some Syrian Facebook groups, reading comments. I know that they were really happy with the verdict. They were not happy about the sentencing. They thought that it should be much, much longer than 12 years.
Paras: Yeah. And Fritz, as you mentioned, this case is part of this bigger puzzle, right? This is one piece of a puzzle that's playing out across Europe as many national courts really take on this role of trying to address atrocity crimes that happened outside their borders against defendants who are not their own nationals, and that's using a legal concept called universal jurisdiction. So, how does universal jurisdiction work? What role has it been playing lately in these types of cases?
Fritz: Universal jurisdiction is this idea that there are those most grave crimes that we know of — genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes — that they are so grave that they concern all of humanity, and national courts should have jurisdiction over them even if the defendant in the case isn't the national of that state. The crimes weren't committed in the territory of that state, and the victims are not nationals of that state. But, because of the gravity of it, with shocking humanity as a whole, that jurisdiction should still exist for such a national court.
There's different levels of universal jurisdiction in different national laws. They have been especially actively used in European countries in the past years, and have, some would argue, have really seen a renaissance of being applied in the framework of Syria cases. And that has everything to do with the fact that the international avenues have been blocked. The United Nations Security Council that could have referred the Syria file to the International Criminal Court was blocked by vetoes by Russia and China. A specialized Syria tribunal has never been established for the same reasons. And so that's why, you know, national jurisdictions have stepped up, and Syrian and international civil society have really started focusing on using that as the legal arena where trials are possible.
Hope: In the Netherlands, we don't have a pure form of universal jurisdiction, which actually means that there are certain criteria to trigger jurisdiction, which is sometimes a little bit difficult, but also makes the prosecutorial strategy more focused in the sense that here in the Netherlands, the perpetrator needs to be on Dutch soil to trigger investigations. So, that is something that actually makes it a little bit more difficult, but at the same time, this is what we have to deal with.
Paras: And what type of precedent could this case set in the Netherlands itself?
Fritz: In the Netherlands itself, it’s, of course, as it is the first trial against a regime-related accused, this is the first example of how such a case can be situated within the overall context of the Syrian war, how a case concerning charges of crimes against humanity, how that can be argued that certain individual facts took place within that framework of what the regime perpetrated against its own civilian population. It's interesting in that in the decision of the court, they actually address this explicitly and say, of course, this decision or any decision will be a point of orientation for any future similar cases, but that every case, of course, is super individually specific on the individual cases, of the individual facts of that case. I think, Hope, maybe you can say something about this interesting part of this case, where they also qualified the militia that the accused worked with.
Hope: Maybe just really quickly on the precedent setting. The court decided that the Liwa Al Quds can be categorized as a criminal organization contributing to crimes against humanity. So, I think in that sense, it's very important to see that this is precedent setting also for other factions, other parties, other you know, if it's state or if it's opposition. I think it's a very good classification of what is possible or what else is possible when trying to be a little bit creative in getting these cases indicted.
Paras: Yeah, that's all such helpful context, and hopefully, this case does set precedent in the Netherlands. What are some of the challenges around these types of cases?
Hope: So, besides the few challenges that we discussed on jurisdiction, I think one thing that's very important to continuously, you know, have in the back of your mind is the challenge of evidence collecting. S one thing, you know, the linkage evidence between survivors, victims, and then the facts of the case, which have happened in Syria, far away from the Netherlands, is something that we really are very mindful about. You know, collecting this linkage evidence in these cases, is extremely difficult. So this is one thing that we as an organization, but also as, you know, other civil society organizations and our partners, try to also reach out to the community and build this, again, this trust relationship, build this safe place, that they can share their testimonies with us, they can share information with, for instance, our war crimes unit here in the Netherlands, and that, you know, the Dutch really are doing their best to make sure that these cases are up and running.
Fritz: And if I can just add to that, you know, that this challenge that Hope just described goes to the simple truth that these cases are extremely heavily based on witness testimony, right? Witnesses that have fled from the place where the crimes occurred, in this case Syria, often are traumatized, and live in different places around Europe and have to be interviewed with the help of, you know, mutual legal assistance requests between jurisdictions, and as we all know, you know, human memory is flawed and is not, especially after many years have passed, and trauma has had an effect. These are fragile cases. And that's where we also see our role come in, right? That's why we do some of the work that we do in supporting the victims and the witnesses in these cases to make them feel comfortable, to make sure that they have all the support they need legally, logistically, but also psychologically when needed. Because you never know what a witness or a victim that might play a central role in such a case might decide along the way in, for example, not wanting to take part anymore in a case due to personal circumstances, or other reasons. And for the police war crimes units and the prosecutors working on these cases, that's a big challenge. It's a big risk as well. And that's where we try to support the cases in the best way we can to make sure that they actually are successful when it comes to trial. And we're happy to be playing our part in supporting that. And this time, luckily, it worked out quite well.
Paras: Right. Complicated cases, fragile cases, important cases. Looking ahead, what should we look for next in terms of where universal jurisdiction is going in Europe, and where these cases are headed?
Hope: I think Fritz and I are both smiling, because they're definitely — if I could just reply to the Dutch perspective, or here in the Netherlands. There definitely are universal jurisdiction cases coming up here. So that's something that we can share on different countries, different conflicts.
And I think, you know, without saying anything specific about the cases, this is a trend that we need to support as a community, as an NGO, and I think also, based on our experience, is also supporting other countries and other jurisdictions, right? We have quite a few survivors, victims, witnesses here in the Netherlands that are Syrian, but they have jurisdictional links to other countries. So, I really think, you know, building, continuing to build those relationships and supporting other war crimes units and other mechanisms also is one of my advices that I would give and also for us to keep an eye on.
Fritz: You know, one maybe note of caution is, of course, that we should remind ourselves that this is not the the answer to everything in international criminal justice, right? Universal jurisdiction is one tool. I think our Syrian partners continue stressing that as well with every decision that comes in and that is is positive. They say you know, this is only one step. This is not the answer. This is just an opportunity that we have, and that is why it's worth making use of it.
But at the end of the day, you know, when you, for example, look at what Syrians that we talk with that are not necessarily part of, you know, the NGO, civil society landscape, you know, most of them will still say, well, you know, until the day that that Bashar Al Assad is standing trial, be that in The Hague or elsewhere, or even in Damascus, justice will not be served. And that that remains the big goal. And some would say that we are pretty far away from that day. Others are more hopeful and might, you know, point to the arrest warrant that the French magistrates just issued last fall for President Bashar Al Assad and his brother and two other high-ranking officials of the chemical weapons program.
And then, you know, the other side will say again, well, you know, there's an arrest warrant, but they will never be arrested. So, what is that worth? You ask me personally, I do believe that Bashar Al Assad will stand trial, sooner or later. And what gives me hope here is the unpredictability of political developments. We've seen that with other historical figures in the past, with Milošević as one example. Charles Taylor, another example. So, it is it is possible. I have not lost hope there.
Paras: Is there anything else that you'd like to add that we haven't touched on yet?
Hope: I think we did have one more point from our perspective as an NGO supporting survivors and victims of international crimes is the role of these individuals in a compensation or reparation scheme. Without getting too much into the technical details of that, that's something that I would, at this moment, would like to recommend states, especially European states, to be a little bit more proactive and mindful in what their role as states should be.
Fritz: You know, criminal accountability in a criminal court of law can be a major factor in proceeding justice for communities, for direct victims. But it's not the only factor that can play an important role in that. There is more to what is just than to proceeding that as justice. Helping victims acts as a broader sense of justice is part of our mandate, and in this case, we tried that with a specialized lawyer in joining the case as a civil party on behalf of the victim, and the court found that claim to be too complicated to deal with within the criminal procedure of the trial, because it's — it is complicated. It's a tort, it's a civil law tort suit within the criminal trial, and once it becomes a bit too complicated in terms of the facts, the criminal judges, in this case, will throw out that part of the case and will refer you to a civil judge for bringing that claim, which is something we're considering now, of course, and this is a systemic question that we're dealing with, and there's a space to grow and space to learn there still.
Paras: We'll be following all these issues around universal jurisdiction, access to justice, accountability for atrocity crimes at Just Security. Fritz, Hope, thanks so much for joining the show.
Fritz: Yeah, thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
Hope: Thank you for having us.
Paras: This episode was hosted and produced by me, Paras Shah, with help from Clara Apt. Our theme song is “The Parade” by Hey Pluto.
Special thanks to Fritz Streiff and Hope Rikkelman. You can read all of Just Security’s coverage of atrocity crimes and universal jurisdiction, including Fritz and Hope’s analysis, on our website. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.