Anwar Raslan Syria War Crimes Trial Verdict: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views
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The former officer, Anwar Raslan, was accused of overseeing a detention center where prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 were killed.
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He fled Syria in 2012 after the government committed a massacre in his hometown, killing more than 100 people. He joined Syria’s exiled opposition and traveled with them to peace talks in Geneva in 2014.
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Through nearly 11 years of civil war, the Syrian government bombed residential neighborhoods, used poison gas and tortured countless detainees in state lockups
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Mr. Raslan’s guilty verdict, they say, bolsters the ability of European courts to pursue similar cases while sending a message to war criminals around the world that they could one day face consequences.
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After more than a decade of war, Mr. al-Assad remains in power, and there appears little chance that he or his senior advisers or military commanders will stand trial soon.
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Other potential avenues for justice have also been blocked. Syria is not party to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and Russia and China have used their vetoes on the United Nations Security Council to prevent Syria from being referred to the court.
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Germany is among a few European countries that have sought to try former Syrian officials for war crimes based on universal jurisdiction,
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German prosecutors argued that his position gave him oversight of torture that included beating, kicking, electric shocks and sexual assault. Witnesses in the trial said they were fed inedible food, denied medical care and kept in overcrowded cells.
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He entered Germany on a visa in 2014 and lived there legally until the German authorities arrested him in 2019.
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When the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011 with protests seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad, Mr. Raslan was the head of interrogation at a security office in the capital, Damascus.
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Beatings were common, the food was inedible, the cells were so crowded that some prisoners had to stand so others could lie down. German prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 killed under his authority there.
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The verdict marks a watershed moment for an international network of lawyers, human rights activists and Syrian war survivors who have struggled for years to bring officials who sanctioned or participated in the violence to justice.
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He was arrested in 2019, and his trial began the next year. On Thursday, Mr. Raslan was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life in prison.
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When Mahran Aoiun heard that a former Syrian intelligence officer had been sentenced on Thursday to life in prison for overseeing torture at a detention center, it brought back the joy he felt years ago when he was released from a brutal Syrian jail.
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The verdict handed down by a court in Koblenz, Germany, against the former officer, Ansar Raslan, stirred complicated feelings among Syrians who were abused in Syrian prisons — some at the hands of Mr. Raslan himself.
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Others hoped that Mr. Raslan’s conviction would draw attention to the many more crimes committed during the Syrian war that have not been prosecuted, and to the officials who committed them who are still free.
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“Those who are torturing prisoners will think twice after the trial,” he said. “This is an achievement.”
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New York Times photographers have covered Syria’s civil war and the humanitarian crisis it has unleashed since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began nearly 11 years ago.
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A Syrian doctor accused of torturing a detainee in a secret military prison will soon go on trial in Germany on charges of crimes against humanity and causing grievous bodily harm. The doctor, Alaa Mousa, was living in Germany as a refugee when he was arrested in 2020.
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German prosecutors built their case with the help of hundreds of Syrian witnesses in Germany and beyond. They indicted Mr. Raslan using “universal jurisdiction,” a legal principle stipulating that in the case of crimes against humanity and genocide, normal territorial restraints on prosecutions do not apply.
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The principle is not new. Israel used it during the 1960s trial of the former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, as did Spain in 1998 when demanding that Britain arrest Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. Previous universal jurisdiction cases in Germany have dealt with crimes committed in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, more recently, with the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq by former members of the Islamic State.
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Germany has the legal basis to prosecute such crimes under the German Code of Crimes Against International Law, which came into effect in 2002, and it has been using it.
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“For Germany, it’s also historically the continuation of what we learned from the Nazi period and what we learned about the importance of the Nuremberg trials and the Auschwitz trials for the way we dealt with our past and ultimately for who we are today,”
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The Nuremberg trials went after the leading members of the Nazi regime, but also a range of individuals who played a role in Nazi repression, including doctors, business leaders, bureaucrats and propagandists, said Wolfgang Kaleck, a founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which is representing victims in Mr. Raslan’s trial.
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Raslan is the first ranking Syrian official to be convicted of war crimes, but he may not be the last.
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Owing partly to its own history in World War II, Germany has become something of a go-to venue for prosecuting crimes against humanity, even if committed outside its own borders. It is also home to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, putting it at the center of efforts to hold the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria accountable for war crimes.
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Human rights lawyers concede that so far, the trials have targeted low- and middle-ranking Syrian officials or soldiers.
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“If you don’t start now, then in 10 years, you cannot get Assad or his chief of intelligence because you have no evidence,” Mr. Kaleck said. “These cases are a way of building a stock of documents, witness statements, of understanding interconnections and gathering knowledge on which you can build future cases.”
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Since the Syrian uprising in 2011, Syrian victims, human rights activists and others have filed more than 20 legal complaints against Syrian regime officials for war crimes and other violations of international law, according to Mr. Kaleck’s center.
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This body of evidence, which has been growing for over a decade, could be used in different cases.“More has to come, that is clear,” Mr. Kaleck said. “But this is an important step.”
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But the decade-long conflict has left the country shattered, killing hundreds of thousands of people, forcing half of the population from their homes and reducing major cities to rubble. Most of those who remain have been left to live in poverty.
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The rebellion that began in 2011 as an uprising against Syria’s autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad, escalated into a civil war, but the splinted rebel movement failed to topple the government.
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But the war was gruesome. The government employed poison gas, barrel bombs and suffocating sieges on rebellious communities, and waged a ruthless assault on civilian opponents, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy prisons where many were tortured and killed.
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Some Arab countries have begun restoring ties with the government in an effort to move past the war, although strict sanctions by the United States and other Western countries have blocked most investment.
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The United States initially provided covert military support to the rebels, but as the war splintered into multiple overlapping conflicts, America shifted its focus to fight the jihadists of the Islamic State, who at their peak controlled nearly a third of eastern Syria.
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For Syrian civilians, there is less daily violence now than during the war’s earlier years, but the economy has been destroyed.
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More than half of Syria’s prewar population fled their homes during the fighting, and most have not returned, including the 5.6 million refugees who largely live in destitution in neighboring Arab countries.
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“Justice has not been fully accomplished,” he said. “This is a small slice of what we are talking about.”