Introductory Remarks by Taylor Kilpatrick

Good morning, everyone. Thank you all so much for joining us for our first session of the morning. For those of you who do not know, my name is Taylor Kilpatrick. I am the Senior Programs Manager here at the Society. You have probably seen me in a mad-dash blur moving around the space because this is the event that I help organize. So thrilled that you all could be here for the annual meeting as a whole, but I am also thrilled to be introducing the panel this morning. This is our Late-Breaking Panel–Syria’s New Dawn: Legal and Political Challenges Post-Assad.

And for those of you who have been to annual meetings in the past, you know this moniker of “late-breaking panel.” But for those who have not, you might be wondering why this is called that. The process of organizing the annual meeting takes truly a year, and the panels are organized and set—the schedule is set in the fall, the late summer, early fall of the previous year. And so, of course, a lot can happen in international law between the fall and the spring, and so we always reserve a few sessions that we deem late breaking, and they come together in a much shorter time frame. We are thrilled to be able to present this as one of our late-breaking sessions this year.

I also want to note that ASIL had the pleasure of hosting an expert roundtable in the fall at our headquarters at Tiller House entitled “Time and Distraction as the Ultimate Weapon: The 10th Anniversary of the Caesar Report.” Several of our panelists who are here today were on that expert roundtable, and we are thrilled to convene this group of wonderful experts as our next iteration and then also to continue the series of expert roundtables through the rest of this year. Please stay tuned, all of which will be centered on Syria and different specific aspects of new developments in the region.

It is now my pleasure to introduce our moderator for the session who has done a truly remarkable job bringing together this group and everything in this short time frame. Noor Hamadeh is an advocacy counsel at the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR) where she works to advance U.S. legal safeguards against corporate abuse in U.S. supply chains. Noor is also a member of Huquqyat, a collective of Syrian women lawyers advocating for and supporting justice and accountability processes in Syria. Prior to joining ICAR, Noor founded and headed the Human Rights and Business Unit at the Syrian Legal Development Program.

Without further ado, I will turn it over to Noor to begin the session. Thanks.

Remarks by Noor Hamadeh

Thanks so much, Taylor, and thanks, everyone,for joining us today.

I want to start by introducing our brilliant panelists. We are joined to my left by Harout Ekmanian who is an international litigation and arbitration associate at Foley Hoag. We are also joined virtually by Radwan Ziadeh who is joining us all the way from Damascus. Radwan is a senior fellow at the Arab Center of Washington, D.C., and director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies. We are also joined by Professor David Crane, founder of the Global Accountability Network and distinguished scholar in residence at Syracuse University College of Law, and at the very end of the table, we are joined by Professor David Scheffer who is a professor at Arizona State University and former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues.

I am so thrilled to be moderating what I think will be a really great discussion on a topic that is very close to my heart. During the first week of December 2024, Syrian opposition forces led by Hay’at Tahir al-Sham took over large swaths of Syria, culminating on December 8 in the takeover of Damascus, the release of tens of thousands of detained and disappeared Syrians, and ultimately the fall of the Assad regime.

After fourteen years of conflict and fifty-four years of living under a deeply repressive authoritarian regime, Syria has a window of opportunity to rebuild the country, to redefine and reform government institutions, and seek justice for the atrocities that have occurred. This historic moment has not come without its challenges. There have been heated debate among Syrians regarding the process of developing an interim government and the composition of that government, the development of an interim constitution, and the rise in sectarian violence and revenge killings.

I am joined by this brilliant panel of experts today who will share some thoughts on the current realities on the ground in Syria relating to transitional justice as well as some thoughts on how justice and accountability can be advanced in Syria.

I would like to start off the discussion with the current state of things, Harout. One of the most significant barriers to progress in Syria is something once looked to as an accountability tool, economic sanctions. Can you share more with us about sanctions on Syria and their impact? What do they mean for Syria’s ability to progress?

Remarks by Harout Ekmanian

Thank you very much, Noor, for this thoughtful introduction. Thanks to ASIL and Taylor for organizing this very important and timely panel about Syria.

To begin answering your question, I would like to frame the situation in Syria through the words of Antonio Gramsci, “The old world is dying, the new is yet to be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” These words aptly capture the challenging transition the country is currently experiencing.

During the next few minutes, to answer this question about sanctions, I will mostly focus on one of these morbid symptoms that Gramsci mentioned. It is sanctions. Beyond the sectarian and political identities, the vicissitudes of history and their procession of blood and violence, the tragedy of the Syrians have long been that they are unfulfilled citizens in an unfinished state. The relationship between citizen and state has all been but linear. However, since the fall of the Assad regime, which by the way is only one of the three hereditary dictatorships in the world, but since its fall, there was a rise for a great hope for the future in Syria.

While the Assad regime eroded many of the state institutions until it fell, and caused the disintegration of the state, the new power in Damascus took over these state institutions in a relatively peaceful manner. We saw also, on TV live footage, how anti-Assad forces entered Damascus—they concluded meetings with the cabinet and ministers appointed by Assad. They took over their responsibilities, and they sent them to their homes untouched.

We are not in front of a situation of state succession, not an occupation obviously, and not even a traditional coup d’état. For practical purposes, I will move forward describing it simply as a government or regime change.

Under this premise, the continuity of treaty obligations is generally presumed under international law. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties provides that treaties remain enforced, despite changes in government. This would, of course, include obligations arising from international human rights instruments.

The new government in Damascus ceased working with the former Syrian constitution and formed the Constitutional Committee, as Noor was just mentioning, and the committee published a constitutional declaration for the transitional period of five years. The Article 12 of this declaration, the constitutional declaration, states the following: “All rights and freedoms stipulated in the international human rights treaties, charters, and agreements ratified by the Syrian Arab Republic are an integral part of this constitutional declaration.”

You may wonder why I began by mentioning sanctions and have now shifted to international human rights obligations. The reason is that the two are inherently interconnected. Sanctions were imposed by primarily Western countries on entities and individuals supporting the Assad regime. While it made sense to maintain sanctions on those convicted of violations after the regime’s fall, there is a clear need to lift sanctions on vital institutions like the Central Bank of Syria and those managing aid and loans to state institutions to enable recovery and reconstruction.

With the Assad regime no longer in power, the original rationale for imposing sanctions has effectively disappeared. However, sanctioning states appears to have shifted from their original justifications to a wait-and-see approach, observing the interim government’s actions before deciding on future policy. This approach raises multiple questions about the sanctions themselves, their reasons, who they target, their effects, and what can be lifted soon or what must actually be lifted soon for Syria to become more stable and secure.

The current sanctions regime on Syria is significantly hindering the nation’s recovery and transitional justice process. While aimed at pressuring Assad regime, these sanctions are inadvertently stifling the broader population’s ability to rebuild and worsening its human rights crisis.

Essential infrastructure projects are delayed or halted due to restrictions on financial transactions and imports. Additionally, the sanctions exacerbate the humanitarian crisis by limiting access to food, medicine, and other vital resources, impeding the population’s ability to fully enjoy a broad range of human rights, such as health, education, adequate standard of living, water and sanitation, and the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, among others. Under the weight of extensive and disproportionate sanctions, the Syrian state has been effectively incapacitated, as I mentioned.

But, furthermore, sanctions are exacerbating security concerns and instability. As the interim government struggles to regulate its security forces due to a state’s diminished capacity, the widespread violence that erupted on the Syrian coast in early March was partly driven by governance failures and delays in pursuing transitional justice efforts, which my colleague, Radwan Ziadeh, will elaborate more on after me.

However, all of these were worsened by the lack of essential services. Without sanctions relief, the interim government’s ability to establish stability and accountability remains in great jeopardy. A country that is not allowed to recover economically is all but guaranteed to fail in its transitional justice process. It is untenable for the international community to both constrain the process and demand specific outcomes.

Speaking of the devil, sanctioning states also have international legal obligations, including the duty to refrain from actions that infringe upon the human rights of the population in the targeted state.

In its 1997 general comment, the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights asserted that: “Just as the international community insists that any targeted state must respect the civil and political rights of its citizens, so too must that state and international community itself do everything possible to protect at least the core content of economic, social, and cultural rights of the affected peoples of that state.” In this regard, the committee outlined three responsibilities, incumbent on sanctioning—not sanctioned—states.

The first is that the rights enshrined in international covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights must be taken fully into account when designing a sanctions regime.

Second, effective monitoring should be undertaken throughout the period when sanctions are enforced. As the committee explained, sanctioning states unavoidably assume a responsibility to do all within their power to protect the economic and social rights of the affected population in the targeted state.

And, finally, sanctioning states have an obligation to take steps individually and through international assistance and cooperation, especially economic and technical, to respond to any disproportionate suffering experienced by the vulnerable groups within the targeted country.

The detrimental impact of these sanctions regime on human rights in post-Assad Syria is evident. These sweeping coercive measures have further deterred foreign investment and obstructed economic revitalization. Even in the face of encouraging signals from the recent governmental appointments and constructive public messaging by the interim government, it is crucial to reassess these sanctions and explore more targeted measures that hold perpetrators accountable without further punishing innocent civilians.

A few quick notes in the end. First, sanctions in similar experiences in Iraq or Sudan took a long time to be lifted, and the issue was not related to the fall or collapse of the regimes that imposed them.

Second, the process of lifting sanctions on Syria could go through several stages; most notably, the evaluation stage followed by the suspension and partial lifting leading to the full lifting of sanctions. It could take years—up to a decade or more.

The priorities of lifting sanctions in Syria include lifting sanctions on the central bank of Syria and the banking sector, followed by the energy and oil sector, then the loans and aid sector for the government institutions and finally telecommunications.

Last but not least, taking into account the interests of the countries imposing sanctions on Syria is an important issue to accelerate the lifting of the sanctions, and I would call that the elephant in the room.

I will stop here and happy to answer any questions after my co-panelists.

Noor Hamadeh

Thank you so much, Harout. I think your point regarding sanctions losing their purpose and stifling progress is well taken. As you said, the Syrian state has a chance to rebuild, but sanctions are clipping Syrians’ wings and preventing that from happening in a more efficient way.

Also, the other point you mentioned that I want to highlight is that responsibility is not just on Syria in terms of international human rights law but also sanctioned states as well, and they are abdicating their responsibility in that sense. Thank you so much, Harout.

I want to turn next to Radwan. Radwan, Syrians have been preparing for transitional justice for many years, and now there is finally a real opportunity to bring that to fruition. Can you share more about transitional justice processes and how we are seeing them play out in Syria at the moment?

Remarks by Radwan Ziadeh

Thank you, Noor. Thank you, everyone. Good afternoon. Sorry that maybe the connection here is not very good. That is one of the results of the sanction here. The Zoom link itself, I have to go through VPN through Germany to be able to connect. This is to give you just a sense how crucial the sanction is for the Syrian to be able to reconnect to the world.

The authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad and his father for almost sixty years put Syria out of touch with the international community. The revolution of 2011, the sanctions of 2011, the Caesar Act, and all of this played a crucial role the victory of the Syrians in December last year, because one of the economic sanctions was very effective in cutting any connection between the Assad regime and the world.

Now, the reason behind the sanctions was to end the human rights violations committed by the Assad regime. Most Syrians ask why the international community is still imposing those sanctions, where the main reason and the rationale behind the sanctions has changed.

Going back to your question, Noor, from December 8, the current president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, put transitional justice as a key issue in his administration. He mentioned transitional justice and the need to form an independent commission for transitional justice. He repeated that in his speech in front of the National Dialogue Conference, and then also that has been included in the constitutional declaration in Article 49, that the state should form an independent commission for transitional justice.

From my visit to Syria after eighteen years and traveling all around Syria, I found there is a different understanding of the concept of transitional justice. As we know, transitional justice, it means five main pillars: the first one, truth commissions; the second one, reform state institutions; the third one, prosecution or accountability and justice for the ones who committed crimes against humanity and war crimes or crimes of enforced disappearances or torture; the fourth one, reparation, no matter what is on the material side or as a recognition from political prisoners, the families of enforced disappearances and all of that; and the fifth one, it is memorialization, turning Sednaya Prison into a museum.

Tomorrow, we are going to the Sednaya Prison along with the two American congressmen. This is the first visit from the U.S. Congress into Syria, and tomorrow they will go and visit Sednaya Prison, which the Amnesty International called a slaughterhouse.

The crimes committed in Syria in the last fourteen years, as Professor Crane and others who have been following the patterns of the crimes in Syria, have not been seen in other countries on this large of a scale. This is why I think it is beyond the capacity of the Syrian state to be able to investigate all of these war crimes and crimes against humanity. In all of these cases, we are talking about an estimate of a million people who lost their lives, combatant and non-combatant, and more than seven million refugees who left the country seeking safe refuge outside of Syria in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt and then spread all over the world. We have a more than a million Syrian refugees in Germany. This is why the scale of the crimes in Syria requires the full attention of the current Syrian administration, and the help of the international community.

What we hope for in the coming weeks is an announcement for a new commission of transitional justice, which includes the five pillars I mentioned, truth commissions to be able to know exactly who gave the orders and who gave the decision and the fate of millions of victims, political prisoners, tortured or missing people.

At the same time, there is a debate among the Syrians about what type of court should take responsibility to try and prosecute the one who committed the crimes. The concept here in Syria is that it will be a domestic court, but at the same time, you have to set up the standard of this domestic court very close to the international standards, because maybe we do not need this court to be seen as a tool for the new regime against any type of group or of any type of sect. It needs to be seen as impartial and independent.

The third one, of course, looking for ways to reform the state institutions, the security reform for the army and in all the prisons, and all the state institutions that became the source of the human rights violations has to be reformed and has to be under supervision by the civilians.

Lastly, the need for help from the international community on these different fronts. There is a high expectation of the Syrian people that a new chapter of Syria will bring peace for them, stability and security, and at the same time, justice. But we have low capacity to be able to deal with this very difficult legacy in the last fourteen years. This is why the new commission of transitional justice needs a lot of support and the help from the international community to be able to do its tasks.

In the Arab region, we have two cases of transitional justice. A case in Morocco, which is looking into the fate of former political prisoners, 772 cases. It has a requirement regarding exploring the truth about those political prisoners.

The second case is in Tunisia. Unfortunately, the Truth and Dignity Commission failed to meet its requirements regarding accountability and reparation because of the political environment. This is why we know the success of any commission of transitional justice depends entirely on the political environment. This is why one of my jobs and tasks here to be able to reach out to most of the political leaders, different political parties, social and tribal leaders, to be able to educate them to get the support of the commission of transitional justice, because in the case of Tunisia, unfortunately, the head of the commission has been imprisoned by the new leader in Tunisia. The Transitional Justice Commission relied mainly on the support of the political elite and the political powers to be able to meet its mandate.

I will stop here and am happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much.

Noor Hamadeh

Thank you so much, Radwan. You raised a really crucial point, which is that the extent of the crimes that have been committed in Syria require the full priority of the current administration in Syria, as well as the international community. You also raised a really important point about the fact that Syria is at very low capacity to be able to address these crimes, and that reiterates the point about needing to remove the current sanctions and also the need for the international community’s involvement.

I think another point you raised brings me to our next speaker—the question of what kind of court, and you said that Syrians prefer a domestic court. With that, I will turn to Professor David Crane. If you can share a little bit more about what a domestic criminal court could look like in Syria.

Remarks by David Crane

Thank you, Noor. It is a pleasure to be here with you. I approach all of this as a practitioner. I have been doing this for twenty-five years, creating tribunals and courts and taking down heads of state. President Charles Taylor is one of them. When I approach these challenges in Syria, which I have been working on since March of 2011, I look at this not as an academic, but just someone who has done it and is continuing to do it.

Along with my good friend, David Scheffer, and other distinguished members of a high-level working group, we have just established a special tribunal for Ukraine on the crime of aggression. I cannot give you too much detail, other than that it will probably be announced in May by President Zelenskyy. So we do have an aggression court, and we were very much involved over the past two and a half years in creating that.

When I consider Syria, I approach it for having been involved in doing this for many years, to include Syria. I recall—and this is where deja vu all over again comes in—a little over fourteen years ago, I was invited to The Hague. A very small Syrian national congress, along with various other academics and practitioners, wanted me to come over and talk—and this is during the Arab Spring, if you recall, so everything was very heady, and there is a possibility of justice. And so the question to me was, what do we do with Assad in the spring of 2011? The thought being is that he would fall and that we would have to do something. That began that conversation. What are the justice options in prosecuting Assad?

Here I am now, literally, a little over fourteen years later, actually contemplating the very same questions that were asked of me by my good friend, Radwan, who I met in The Hague in 2011, as to what do we do with this guy? The reaction is, take him out in front of the palace and hang him. I said back in 2011, that is not a great way to start a new country. That is just not the way to do it.

I allowed them to vent, we adjusted, and then everything went dark. The world walked away from Syria, and then all of a sudden, in December of 2024—and no one saw this coming, folks—he fell like a house of cards and is gone and now is a bargaining chip for Russia to use in future negotiations. As I was talking to a member of the press last week, I said Assad is a bargaining chip. He has no future in Russia. I could contemplate Assad being handed back to the Syrians someday, and this is where then we talk about what is that going to look like.

Looking at the broad picture, what are our options? Of course, we always tend to knee-jerk and go, well, let us set up an international tribunal. It sounds so good. It sounds like you are doing something. It has been my experience—and I am sure David could echo—that the international community does not like to set up international courts. It is like pulling teeth, and we have been doing that for many years. It is hard, brutal, painful, and takes years. At the end of the day, it is a political decision, not a legal decision, to create a tribunal.

So what do we do? Is there an international tribunal for Syria? The answer is, in my considered opinion, no. The world does not have a political appetite to create an international tribunal related to Syria, even though we all, in our hearts, would say, wow, that has to be done. Having been very much involved in Syria—and I am the co-author of the Caesar Report, and I am the guy that gave him the code name Caesar to make sure that we protect him—we have been very much involved in this. We have seen the horror, and so justice has to be done. But the option of an international tribunal just is not there, and I do not honestly foresee that happening.

Okay. That is fine. Well, then what other options do we have? What about the region? It is the Middle East, and they do not have a great track record in international criminal law. They are not forward thinkers in those types of things, and so I do not see, politically and realistically, any kind of regional justice mechanism to account for the horrors that Assad, his family, and others had perpetrated on the Syrian people for half a century.

Where does that leave us? Those of us who have been in this business want to help, want to get involved, have great experience in doing that, but we also have to be very respectful of the Syrian people, mainly the victims. All of this is foreign to the victims. We tend to forget that. We tend to get legalistic, and we tend to step over the victims. But when I went into West Africa as the founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, my first priority was the victims, asking them what happened. What can we do? What is justice to you? And so that translates easily to the Syrian people, too.

There is a lot of momentum in the international community, a lot of NGOs, a lot of movement forward delegations coming in, but they tend to push the victims aside and look at the graves and have photo opportunities. But, at the end of the day, whatever we do regarding a justice mechanism for Syria, it is for the victims, and there are millions of them in some shape or form.

I am a big advocate of a domestic, a special criminal court created out of Syrian law, Syrians prosecuting Syrians in violations of Syrian law, and I think that can be done. We have a moment here. We tend to try to set these things up quickly because it makes us feel better, but we do have time. We are lucky that we have a moderate transitional government right now that is open to various options. The key point here right now is just to get Syria stabilized so that my good friend Radwan can get on the internet and talk to the world. We tend to forget that Syria was cut off, and this is a perfect example of how cut off they were for a half a century.

Syria just needs to be able to turn the lights on, pick up the garbage, and get kids back in school. We can do a justice mechanism later. Russia, very kindly, put the primary suspect in custody, and he is not going anywhere. We know where he is and a lot of his family. We have the time to carefully consider what a domestic court would look like.

Is there room for international experts? The answer is yes, but in the background, the Syrian people have to see this special court in Syria as their court working for them. We do not need to see international people running around.

My discussions with the Syrians is they want to see this happen. They want to do this themselves, and we have to respect that because, again, international criminal law, which David and I, among a couple others, are the founders of, this is white man’s justice. This is Western European justice. We tend to overlook the cultural approach to regional atrocity zones, and so I am a big advocate in something that I did in West Africa. I considered the cultural approach to is the justice we seek, the international community, the justice they want, and so we have got to be very careful.

There is a moment in time in the next year or two or three where we will carefully assist the Syrians in whatever way we can assist, but allow them to create this special criminal court in the Syrian justice system under Syrian law to prosecute Assad and many of those who perpetrated such horror stories on the Syrian people. That is my approach as far as our considerations this morning, and it is the approach that we are taking and providing Radwan and others. I just laid out a step-by-step approach in how to create an internationally based but yet domestic court, in other words, all of the fair trial guarantees and all of the things that the international community would like to see, but in reality, it would be under Syrian law procedure as well as substantive law.

I am hopeful. I have been doing this for a long time, fourteen years in Syria—that in the next two or three years, we will see a domestic court prosecuting probably Assad and his henchmen, but certainly prosecuting his senior leaders and others for what they did to the Syrian people. I look forward to your questions after the panel. Thank you.

Noor Hamadeh

Thank you so much, Professor. I really appreciate your point about centering Syrians in this process and in terms of their needs, in terms of their wants, and I think this feeds into a principle of law in general, which is that the client’s needs and the client’s interests are what is most important, and I think that applies to the international criminal law context as well.

I will turn next to Professor Scheffer. Professor, I would love to hear what advice you have for Syrians as they are building out justice and accountability measures.

Remarks by David Scheffer

Thank you very much, Noor, and thank you for all those kind words, David. This guy is one of the real champions out there on deck every day, and we had a long journey with Ukraine.

David Crane

We did.

David Scheffer

But at least something pretty concrete is going to happen soon.

And, Harout, I just want to say, part of what I am about to say is premised on the economic sanctions platform being dealt with and dealt with constructively because, as David himself said, the society of Syria needs to be upgraded very quickly on many fronts. It is not just justice. It is their entire cultural, societal, economic, developmental, educational, and governmental structure, and the economic sanctions are a huge part of that equation. I embrace everything that David just said, and I do not want to repeat it at all.

I do want to make a few additional comments in the vein that Professor Crane just conveyed to you. First, I think there needs to be a mindset about what is ahead of us in Syria, and that is, do not go down the track of trying to build what you think, in the Western society, is your notion of some perfect international legal structure to deal with the atrocities of the Assad regimes, to achieve some sort of perfect international justice result at the end of the day, because that is going to take you down a lot of rabbit holes. It is going to waste a lot of time, and at the end of the day, the victims are not really going to be satisfied with what you produce.

As we did in the past thirty years, looking at how to build other tribunals, we had to keep our eye on the ball of what is pragmatically possible, given the circumstances of this particular situation, not what you theoretically think should be done, but what is pragmatically possible. Transitional justice, as conveyed by our colleagues in Damascus, has a very well-known structure and pillars of achievement. We are all familiar with transitional justice objectives, and they are splendid to be pursuing, and they need to be pursued. I just think that the mindset that we need, particularly for Syria right now, keeping transitional justice objectives very much in the forefront of our mind, we also need to think about achieving credible justice. What is credible justice in the context of a population that has been severely abused by its national government over the last twenty, thirty years or so?

With that in mind, I not only embrace the idea of a domestic court—the one term that David did not use, which I will use, is what I think we are suggesting is, it is a domestic court, but it has an internationalized add-on to it. We can internationalize that tribunal, working with the Syrian government and with the Syrian civil society, so that the result from that special court is not only based on Syrian law but also reflects the character of the violations by these individuals of international criminal law as well. And so that court also could benefit from having some staff from the international community embedded within that system. That does not necessarily mean judges or literally the prosecutors, but it certainly points toward some sort of contribution that experts outside of Syria can bring to that enterprise.

Now, credible justice, for me, involves for Syria a matrix of areas. You have your whole universal jurisdiction opportunity and other jurisdictions, whereby Syrian perpetrators who happen to land in other jurisdictions can be identified, arrested, and prosecuted under universal jurisdiction principles in other jurisdictions. That has been happening, those of you who are expert in this. We have a whole roster of cases now that have occurred in mostly European courts with respect to Syria. That definitely needs to continue.

That is an important prong of credible justice, because the perpetrators do have to get the message that they simply cannot escape from justice simply by embedding themselves in some community in Germany. That is not going to happen, or at least we are going to try to see that it does not happen.

There is also this entire reality for Syria of a massive investigative mechanism of many different organizations that are investigating and have investigated for years the crimes in Syria. We need to continue to perpetuate that, to support it, to allow those organizations, whether it be CIJA or the UN investigative mechanisms, to continue their work, collect that evidence, and make it available to a domestic court in Syria, make it available to universal jurisdiction courts. All of that needs to take place.

Third, with respect to the domestic court itself, I like to think of it a little bit more along the lines of what the War Crimes Chamber of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Court is like, in the sense that it has the personal jurisdiction to reach far down the leadership ladder to actual perpetrators of the crimes physically that occurred during the Bosnian conflict.

I think the Syrian people are going to demand that. You can say, yes, we need to get the leaders, but there also has to be the capacity to reach way down. It is a lesson I learned in Cambodia where I would go out into the villages, and I would say the leaders of Pol Pot are now on trial in Phnom Penh. And their response was “Yes, we want that. We want Khieu Samphan on trial. We want Nguyen Chia on trial. But, by the way, I want the guy in the village next door who raped and killed my daughter, and he is still living free. I want him prosecuted too. Can you achieve that for us?” Of course, I could not.

In Syria, the crimes are so raw and so well absorbed by the survivors that there has to be an ability—and it will take tens of years—to ultimately bring the perpetrators to actual justice, perpetrators all the way down the line.

My last comment. I may be unknowing of how certain things are being done here with Syria, but it seems to me we have reached a stage with Syria where there needs to be a master envoy, a special envoy, perhaps from the United Nations, perhaps from the European theater or the Arab theater, someone who is seen as getting this matrix completely coordinated and orchestrated so that all of the pieces are working in a coordinated fashion, including building that domestic court in Syria and bringing the pressure of the international community to bear on the Syrian government to get that job done.

There does, in my view, need to be an individual who is the point person that we can all look to and pressure and bother and frustrate to get that job done, because right now we have got all sorts of different strands trying to influence this situation. We need someone who understands that there is a matrix to be achieved, to get through, and there is a plan to do so. I will finish with that.

Noor Hamadeh

Thank you so much, Professor. I really appreciate your point about naming it as a credible justice matrix because I do think, as you said, with universal jurisdiction and international organization investigations, that is something that has been going on for the last several years. I think that is an opportunity for Syria in the sense that there is a lot already developed that can be built upon.

I am also generally hearing a couple of common threads through what all of you have said, which is that Syria really needs to rebuild and redevelop, and sanctions are severely limiting that ability. Second is the need to be pragmatic and realistic, and third, that the justice process really needs to be Syrian-led. Those are all really important points.