BRUSSELS (AP) — France’s highest court is ruling Friday on whether it can strip the head of state immunity of Bashar Assad, the former leader of Syria now in exile in Russia, because of the brutality of the evidence in accusations against him collected by Syrian activists and European prosecutors.
If the judges at the Cour de Cassation lift Assad’s immunity, it could pave the way for his trial in absentia over the use of chemical weapons in Ghouta in 2013 and Douma in 2018, and set a precedent to allow the prosecution of other government leaders linked to atrocities, human rights activists and lawyers say.
Assad has retained no lawyers for these charges and has denied he was behind the chemical attacks.
Ruling could open door for prosecutions in other countries
A ruling against Assad would be “a huge victory for the victims,” said Mazen Darwish, president of the Syrian Center for Media which collected evidence of war crimes. “It’s not only about Syrians, this will open the door for the victims from any country and this will be the first time that a domestic investigative judge has the right to issue an arrest warrant for a president during his rule.”
He said the ruling could enable his group to legally go after regime members, like launching a money laundering case against former Syrian Central Bank governor and Minister of Economy Adib Mayaleh, whose lawyers have argued he had immunity under international law.
For over 50 years, Syria was ruled by Hafez Assad and then his son Bashar. During the Arab Spring, rebellion broke out against their tyrannical rule in 2011 across the country of 23 million, igniting a brutal 13-year civil war that killed more than half a million people, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights. Millions more fled to Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Europe. The Assad dynasty manipulated sectarian tensions to stay in power, a legacy driving renewed violence in Syria against minority groups despite promises that the country’s new leaders will carve out a political future for Syria that includes and represents all its communities.
The ruling stripping Assad’s immunity could set a “significant precedent” that “could really set the stage for potentially for other cases in national jurisdictions that strike down immunities,” said Mariana Pena, a human rights lawyer at the Open Society Justice Initiative, which helped bring the case to court.
As the International Criminal Court has issued arrests warrants for leaders accused of atrocities — like Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines — the French judges’ ruling could empower the legal framework to prosecute not just deposed and exiled leaders but those currently in power.
Assad allegedly bombed, tortured and gassed civilians
The Syrian government denied in 2013 that it was behind the Ghouta attack, an accusation the opposition rejected as Assad’s forces were the only side in the brutal civil war to possess sarin. The United States subsequently threatened military retaliation, but Washington settled for a deal with Moscow for Assad to give up his chemical weapons’ stockpile.
Assad survived more than a decade longer, aided militarily by Russia and Iranian-backed proxies. Activists and human rights group accuse him of using barrel bombs, torture, and massacres to crush opponents. But then in late 2024, a surprise assault by rebels swept into Aleppo and then Damascus, driving the dictator to flee for his ally Russia on Dec. 8, 2024. While Darwish and others plan to press Interpol and Russia to extradite him, they know it is unlikely. But an arrest warrant issued by France could lay the groundwork for the former dictator’s trial in absentia or potential arrest if he travels outside Russia.
Any trial of Assad, whether in absentia or if he leaves Russia, would mean this evidence could then “be brought to light,” Pena said, including an enormous trove of classified and secret evidence amassed by the judges during their investigations.
Syrians often took great personal risk to gather evidence of war crimes. Darwish said that in the aftermath of a chlorine gas attack in Douma, for example, teams collected eyewitness testimonies, images of devastation, and soil samples. Others then tracked down and interviewed defectors to build a “chain of command” for the regime’s chemical weapons production and use.
“We link it directly to the president himself, Bashar al-Assad,” he said.
Head of state immunity is ‘almost taboo’
Assad was relatively safe under international law. Heads of state could not be prosecuted for actions taken during their rule, a rule designed long ago to ease dialogue when leaders needed to travel the world to meet, said Jeanne Sulzer, a French lawyer who co-led the case against Assad for the 2013 chemical attack.
She said that kind of immunity is “almost a taboo” regardless of the weight of the charges. “You have to wait until the person is not a sitting in office to be able to prosecute,” she said.
But that protection has been whittled away over the years by courts ruling that the brutality of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Charles Taylor in Liberia, and Slobodan Milošević in Yugoslavia, to name just a few, merited a restructuring of the world’s legal foundations, said James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.
Ending impunity in Syria
Syria today remains beholden to many awful legacies of the Assad dynasty. Poverty, sectarianism, destruction, and violence still haunt the Syrian Arab Republic.
Damascus’ new rulers are investigating nearly 300 people for crimes during several days of fighting on Syria’s coast earlier this year. The interim authorities in Damascus have pledged to work with the United Nations on investigating further war crimes of the Assad regime and the civil war. The global chemical weapons watchdog has called on the new government of interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa to protect and dismantle Assad’s stockpiles.
Darwish is working on 29 cases against Assad and other regime figures who have fled to Russia, the Gulf, Lebanon and Europe. He said many Syrians hope Assad sits for a fair trial in Syria.
“It should be done in Damascus, but we need also a lot of guarantees that we will have a fair trial even for this suspect,” he said.
His organization has already received requests to bring to court war crimes accusations against those involved in recent bloodshed in southern Syria.
“So anyone, whatever his name, or the regime, or their authority, we will keep fighting this type of crime,” Darwish said.
