Syria’s war criminals finally feeling the heat

Across the world, legal experts and activists have been amassing evidence to bring Syrian war criminals to justice and end the accountability vacuum that has surrounded the country’s 6-year-old civil war.

National courts outside Syria are fair game, however, and across the world a flurry of cases are now being prepared to finally bring war criminals to account.

That means that until one of the defendants leaves Syria and is picked up by another country’s authorities, the best this case in Spain can hope for is an international arrest warrant.

Many of the regime officials accused in the Spanish case have traveled out of Syria in recent years, and Ali Mamlouk, the Syrian intelligence chief, was in Italy and Germany only months ago.

Organizations such as the Syria Justice and Accountability Center have been comprehensively preserving documentation of violations since the earliest days of the revolution, and continue to support activists inside Syria who document crimes and atrocities.

It is hubris like this, combined with efforts to smuggle documents and other evidence out of Syria, that assure activists and victims such as Eid that one day justice will prevail.

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