The family and officials of ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad are facing justice in several countries, especially France and Germany, over the country's brutal civil war.
Here are some of the cases:
- France -
Assad, his brother Maher and two generals, Ghassan Abbas and Bassam al-Hassan, have been since November 14, 2023 the subjects of international arrest warrants issued by France.
They are accused of complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes over chemical attacks in August 2013.
The Paris appeals court in June 2024 confirmed the arrest warrant for Assad, but prosecutors said in July they had asked France's highest court to review the legality of the warrant.
French investigators in October 2023 issued international arrest warrants for four senior Syrian army officers believed to have ordered a 2017 bombardment that killed a French-Syrian civilian in the southern city of Daraa.
Fahd Jassem al-Freij, Ali Abdullah Ayoub, Ahmed Mohamed Balloul and Ali Safetli are all accused of war crimes.
A Paris court in May 2024 ordered life prison sentences for three top Syrian security officials for complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes in a landmark case.
Ali Mamlouk, former head of the National Security Bureau; Jamil Hassan, former director of the Air Force intelligence service; and Abdel Salam Mahmoud, former head of investigations -- were all absent, but are sentenced over their role in the torture and disappearance of a French-Syrian father and son in Syria in 2013.
- Germany -
For nearly three years a Syrian military doctor, Alaa Moussa, has been on trial in Frankfurt accused of torture, murder and crimes against humanity in military hospitals.
He arrived in Germany in 2015, and is facing 18 cases of torture of opponents and murder by injection of an inmate.
In January 2022 Germany used the principle of universal jurisdiction to convict a former Syrian colonel who was in the country, Anwar Raslan, of crimes against humanity and jail him for life in prison in the first global trial over state-sponsored torture in Syrian prisons.
A year later in February 2023 in Berlin, a member of a government militia arrested in Germany in 2021 also received a life sentence for war crimes and for the death in 2014 of at least four civilians in the Yarmouk refugee camp near to Damascus.
- Sweden -
In June 2024 a Swedish court acquitted a Syrian former general living there of war crimes charges, saying prosecutors had not proved his involvement in the army's "indiscriminate attacks".
Former brigadier general Mohammed Hamo, 65, was one of the highest-ranking Syrian military officials to stand trial in Europe.
Sweden was the first country to sentence a former Syrian soldier for war crimes in 2017.
- Switzerland -
In March 2024 Switzerland's Attorney General (OAG) charged Assad's uncle Rifaat al-Assad for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity that decades ago earned him the nickname "The Butcher of Hama".
The former Syrian vice president and former Syrian army officer is charged with a long list of crimes committed in February 1982, during a notorious clash between the Syrian military and Islamist opposition in the town of Hama in western Syria.
He went into exile in 1984 after a failed attempt to overthrow his brother Hafez al-Assad.
He travelled to Switzerland and later France, working in opposition to the Syrian regime, before finally returning home in 2021 after 37 years in exile in France.
The date of his trial has not been announced.
- The Hague: first international case -
In the first international case over the Syria conflict, launched by Canada and the Netherlands, the International Court of Justice in The Hague in November 2023 ordered Syria to "take all measures within its power to prevent acts of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment".
Written submissions have to be submitted by early 2025.
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