Yesterday, I wanted to write about the death sentences handed down in person against Atef Najib and in absentia against Bashar al-Assad, Maher al-Assad, Fahd Jassem al-Freij, Mohammad Ayyoush, Louay al-Ali, Qusay Mihoub, Wafiq Nasser and Talal al-Ismaeel.
I held back.
Many friends were celebrating the verdicts as another victory for the Syrian revolution, a moment in which the victims had finally prevailed over their tormentors. Their reaction is understandable. More than that, I wish I could share it. Like countless Syrians, I have waited years to taste some measure of victory over those responsible for the destruction of our country. I have waited even longer to see their victims receive something resembling justice.
But I cannot celebrate these verdicts.
The reason is simple. I do not see these trials as a victory for the revolution. I see them as another insult to it, and, more painfully, another insult to the victims in whose name they are supposedly being conducted.
What we are witnessing bears too many of the hallmarks of justice staged for public consumption: heavily politicised proceedings, dramatic sentences and an abundance of symbolism, but little evidence of the independent and comprehensive judicial process that Syria so desperately needs.
This is not an accidental failure. It reflects the approach the transitional authorities have followed from the outset: to close the book on the past rather than open it properly before the courts.
There are reasons for that reluctance. Opening Syria’s files in earnest would not mean prosecuting only the former regime and its senior officials. Genuine accountability has an inconvenient habit of refusing to stop where political leaders would like it to stop. Once the principle is established that grave crimes must be investigated independently, other actors and other periods inevitably come under scrutiny. The question of accountability could eventually reach people and institutions that the present authorities would rather leave untouched.
There is also the question of international bargains.
The transfer of power in Syria did not occur in a diplomatic vacuum. Russia played a central role in the final arrangements surrounding Bashar al-Assad’s departure and the safe exit of figures associated with his government. Whatever understandings accompanied that process, they inevitably shape the limits within which Damascus is now prepared, or permitted, to move.
That is precisely why these trials offer me so little hope.
They do not look like the beginning of transitional justice. They look like a substitute for it.
There is also a serious legal problem that cannot be wished away by the emotional satisfaction of seeing the names of former regime figures alongside death sentences.
A judgment delivered in absentia under Syrian law does not carry the same finality as a conviction reached after the accused has appeared before the court and exhausted the ordinary procedures available to him. If the defendant later comes under the jurisdiction of the court, the case may have to be tried again. A state that sentences fugitives whom it is neither able nor apparently prepared to bring before its courts has therefore not necessarily delivered justice. It may simply have produced the appearance of justice.
And appearances are the problem.
If Bashar al-Assad and the senior commanders around him are to be held accountable for the vast catalogue of abuses committed in Syria, the answer is not to reach reflexively for ordinary criminal charges simply because they are available in the domestic penal code.
Syria’s catastrophe was not an accumulation of unrelated murders.
It involved prisons, torture, enforced disappearance, indiscriminate attacks, siege, starvation, forced displacement and systematic violence on a scale that demands the appropriate legal vocabulary. The proper questions concern war crimes, crimes against humanity, individual criminal responsibility and, where the evidence supports it, command responsibility.
Those are not semantic distinctions. The legal characterisation of a crime is part of justice itself.
When a state reduces mass atrocity to a conventional charge of intentional killing because its domestic legislation has never been brought into line with the demands of international criminal law, it diminishes the crime even while pretending to punish it. It deprives victims of the judicial recognition of what was actually done to them.
A torture victim does not merely deserve to hear that somebody committed an offence against the penal code. A mother whose son disappeared into one of Syria’s detention centres deserves a judicial record that names the system which made his disappearance possible. Communities subjected to siege, bombardment or forced displacement deserve judgments that establish not merely that individuals died, but why they died, under whose orders, through what machinery of power, and as part of what policy.
That is what serious justice does.
A death sentence announced on television does not, by itself, do any of these things.
There is a dangerous temptation in post-conflict societies to confuse severity with justice. The harsher the sentence, the greater the appearance of accountability. Yet a spectacular punishment delivered through a defective or politicised process can be far less valuable than a carefully constructed prosecution before an independent court.
Justice is not measured by the length of the sentence or the volume of applause that follows it.
It is measured by the integrity of the proceedings.
That is also why the authorities’ approach to transitional justice more broadly should concern Syrians. An institution kept under tight political control cannot credibly investigate the crimes of an entire era. Nor can a genuinely independent transitional justice process emerge if the authorities reject specialised mechanisms capable of applying the principles of international criminal law to the Syrian case.
The danger now is obvious.
The verdicts will be celebrated in official and sympathetic media as proof that transitional justice is already under way. The refrain will soon become familiar: You asked for justice. Here it is. What more do you want?
Quite a lot, in fact.
We want real justice.
We want an independent judiciary whose decisions are not written to satisfy the political needs of the moment. We want trials that recognise crimes for what they were, rather than squeezing them into whatever provisions happen to be available in an antiquated criminal code. We want judges who can examine evidence without instruction from political authorities and prosecutors capable of following responsibility wherever it leads.
We want mechanisms capable of bringing defendants before courts rather than merely sentencing them from afar.
We want proceedings that allow victims and their families to participate, to testify, to understand what happened, and to see the structures responsible for their suffering exposed in public and recorded for history.
We want accountability that is not selectively switched on against the enemies of today’s rulers and switched off when it approaches their allies.
Above all, we want justice that is not subordinated to international deals concluded over the heads of Syrians whose dead and disappeared have already paid the price of other people’s calculations.
There is something profoundly cruel about using the suffering of victims as scenery in a political performance. Their names lend legitimacy to the spectacle, their pain supplies its emotional force, and the authorities receive the applause.
But the victims receive little.
Syria has had enough theatre.
For decades, Syrians watched trials whose verdicts were known before the defendants entered the courtroom. They watched institutions imitate the forms of a state while serving the will of those who controlled it. Replacing one political script with another is not a revolution in justice.
It is merely a change of cast.
The Syrian revolution demanded dignity before it demanded vengeance. Any justice worthy of that revolution must therefore be more demanding than a few dramatic sentences.
It must tell the truth.
It must establish responsibility.
It must protect judicial independence.
It must treat victims as rights-holders rather than rhetorical ornaments.
And it must be prepared to hold accountable anyone whose conduct meets the legal threshold, regardless of uniform, faction, political allegiance or international patron.
Anything less may satisfy the evening news.
It will not satisfy history.
The victims deserve far more.
And so does the Syrian revolution.
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
The post Justice Is Not a Television Spectacle first appeared on The Syrian Observer.
