3 days ago - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stated that at least 10 European citizens were tortured by the Assad government while detained during the Syrian civil war, potentially leaving Assad open to prosecution by individual European countries for war crimes. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated in December 2013 that UN investigations directly implicated Bashar al-Assad in perpetrating crimes against humanity and pursuing an extermination strategy developed "at the highest level of government, including the head of state."

2 weeks ago - Brutal repression, human rights abuses, war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Assad government throughout the course of the conflict led to international condemnation and widespread calls to convict Bashar al-Assad in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

December 20, 2024 - HomeStatementsSummary of the Assad Regime’s Crimes Against the Syrian People Over the... ... The Hague – the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) released a statement briefly summarizing the staggering human and material losses inflicted by Bashar Assad’s regime on the Syrian society and the Syrian state in the last 14 years.

March 24, 2022 - Bashar Al-Assad is guilty of war crimes. To ignore these crimes is to call into question the possibility of a lasting peace. This is why France opposes efforts at normalisation. Syria’s reintegration into the Arab League will not put an end to external interference or to regional instability.

The Syrian government led by president Bashar al-Assad is responsible for systematic and widespread torture targeting opponents and activists not only as a reaction to the protests in 2011. There are currently only a few avenues left to prosecute international crimes committed in Syria.

December 20, 2024 - Foremost was his repeated usage of chemical weapons against civilian populations.2 Investigations led by the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found over 300 instances of such attacks by pro-regime forces, with ...

1 month ago - "This massacre is just one horrific incident in a pattern of state violence and apparent war crimes." The government at the time, led by President Bashar al-Assad, was toppled by rebels in December 2024. Assad's forces had fought jihadist and rebel groups in the civil war which began in March 2011 when security forces cracked down violently on peaceful pro-democracy protests. More than half a million people were killed in over 13 years of conflict which followed. ... A third woman who also returned to Australia from Syria was charged with joining a terrorist organisation. ... Three women who allegedly supported IS were arrested after they flew home to Australia for the first time in years. ... The four women and nine children with links to Islamic State have spent years in a Syrian camp. ... There were highly charged scenes as former senior regime official, Atef Najib, appeared before a Damascus court.

December 13, 2024 - Torture, executions, chemical attacks on civilians, ethnic cleansing, bombing of residential areas, using famine as a weapon of war... The litany of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Bashar al-Assad's regime appers to be endless.

December 9, 2024 - This included attacks with chemical weapons, barrel bombs, and other war crimes, as well as murder, torture, enforced disappearance and extermination that amount to crimes against humanity.

At least two high-profile figures ... issued an arrest warrant for former president Bashar al-Assad on charges of murder and torture....

3 weeks ago - Fadi Saqr is accused of mass killings of civilians in Tadamon, Damascus, where people say he must face justice

December 4, 2025 - Similar evidence has been important ... the War Crimes Act with conspiracy to commit cruel and inhuman treatment of civilian detainees, including U.S. citizens. French courts, too, have issued thirteen arrest warrants against former Syrian officials, including for Bashar al-Assad himself, which ...

Since 2011, a community of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has been assembling vast evidence of the Syrian state’s crimes against humanity, with the aim of supporting international investigations and prosecutions. The authors serve as pro bono advisory board members of one such major NGO, the non-profit Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA). CIJA has amassed more than one million pages of internal Syrian regime records which show in exhaustive detail how Bashar al-Assad and his intelligence and security agencies have conducted—and are still conducting—a deliberate, systematic, and centrally planned campaign of mass murder and torture to keep Assad in power.

3 weeks ago - He is being prosecuted for crimes committed against the people of Deraa in the uprising. It began there after security forces violently cracked down on protesters who took to the streets after several boys had been arrested and tortured for writing anti-government graffiti inspired by the "Arab Spring". Najib is reported to have met representatives of the boys' families at the time and said: "Forget your children. If you want children, make more children. If you don't know how, bring us your women and we will make them for you." Under Assad's regime, human rights activists and protesters were prosecuted at the Palace of Justice, with many of them sentenced to death after unfair trials. Now, by a twist of fate, former officials are facing trial in the same place. Nuha al-Masri, a 54-year-old lawyer from Deraa, was one of those who filed a case against Najib and was in court to see him.

December 10, 2024 - For nearly 14 years the Syrian people have suffered unimaginable horrors as the government, led by President Bashar al-Assad, perpetrated crimes against humanity and war crimes, brazenly violating countless international norms and treaties. For millions of Syrians the overthrow of the Assad ...

1 week ago - International and national courts outside Syria have begun the prosecution of Syrian civil war criminals. War crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government under Bashar Al-Assad or rebel groups include extermination, murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture and imprisonment.

July 11, 2021 - Torture is one of many war crimes committed by Bashar al-Assad's regime. In 2017, we visited a bombed hospital. Thousands of medical facilities, schools and neighborhoods have been levelled by Assad and his ally, Russia.

May 29, 2019 - The commission’s work recently culminated in a four-hundred-page legal brief that links the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of Syrians to a written policy approved by President Bashar al-Assad, coördinated among his security-intelligence agencies, and implemented by regime operatives, who reported the successes of their campaign to their superiors in Damascus. The brief narrates daily events in Syria through the eyes of Assad and his associates and their victims, and offers a record of state-sponsored torture that is almost unimaginable in its scope and its cruelty. Such acts had been reported by survivors in Syria before, but they had never been traced back to signed orders. Stephen Rapp, who led prosecution teams at the international criminal tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone before serving for six years as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, told me that the CIJA’s documentation “is much richer than anything I’ve seen, and anything I’ve

With a unique trove of primary sources, scholars trace Assad’s chain of command directing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria.

For nearly 14 years, the Syrian regime committed crimes against humanity and war crimes, killing hundreds of thousands, displacing millions, and detaining an estimated 100,000 people.