French magistrates on Tuesday ordered three senior members of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime to be tried for collusion in crimes against humanity over the deaths of two French-Syrian nationals in the Syrian war.
The trial will be the first in France of the Syrian regime but not the first in Europe, where Syrian refugees have drawn on the principle of universal jurisdiction to ensure suspected war criminals are held to account.
Here are some of the cases that have made headlines:
- Germany: trailblazer -
Universal jurisdiction allows states to prosecute the most serious crimes known to mankind, regardless of where they were committed.
Germany, which welcomed hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in 2015 and 2016, used the principle to convict a former Syrian colonel, Anwar Raslan, of crimes against humanity and jail him for life in the first global trial over state-sponsored torture in Syrian prisons.
Raslan, who moved to Germany after deserting from the army, was found guilty of overseeing the murder of 27 people and the torture of 4,000 others at a detention centre in Damascus in 2011 and 2012.
Days after he was sentenced in January 2022, a Syrian doctor, Alaa Mousa, went on trial in Frankfurt accused of torture, murder and crimes against humanity in military hospitals, including setting fire to a teenage boy's genitals.
He has denied the charges.
The first former regime member to be convicted over the Syrian war was former intelligence officer Eyad al-Gharib, who was arrested alongside Raslan in Berlin in February 2019.
He was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison in 2021 for helping transport demonstrators to prison despite knowing they would be tortured.
- France: slow progress -
In France, the universal jurisdiction principle is being challenged by two Syrian suspects who argue that they should not have been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity because these crimes do not exist on their own country's statute books.
France's top court is due to rule on the matter in May, in a decision that could decide the cases against former Syrian soldier Abdulhamid Chaban, charged with complicity in crimes against humanity, and Majdi Nema, a former spokesman for the Islamist group Jaysh al-Islam accused of torture and war crimes.
On Tuesday, magistrates drawing on a separate law covering crimes committed against French nationals abroad ordered three senior Assad regime officials to stand trial for complicity in crimes against humanity over the deaths of two French-Syrian nationals.
Ali Mamlouk, head of the National Security Bureau of Assad's Ba'ath party, Jamil Hassan, former head of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, and Abdel Salam Mahmoud, another Air Force intelligence officer, are accused of responsibility in the torture and disappearance of Mazzen Dabbagh and his son Patrick. They are not expected to attend their trial.
The Dabbaghs were arrested in 2013, taken to prison and never seen again.
The Syrian government declared them dead in 2018.
- Sweden: first conviction -
Sweden was the first country to sentence a former Syrian soldier for war crimes in 2017.
The man, who sought asylum in Sweden, was charged over photographs on the internet showing him standing smiling over a pile of bodies, with his boot on one corpse.
While the court could not prove he was responsible for the deaths, it said the picture represented a grave violation of the dignity of the dead and sentenced him to eight months in prison.
- Austria: rebel denounced -
In Austria, the only Syrian to have been tried to date over the war is a former rebel who boasted about executing government forces.
The man was detained in a refugee shelter in Tyrol state in 2016 after being denounced by a fellow Syrian for relating that he shot dead 20 unarmed or injured troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar-al Assad in 2013-2014.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
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