The U.S. State Department has concluded that up to 10 European
citizens have been tortured and killed while in the custody of the
Syrian regime and that evidence of their deaths could be used for war
crimes prosecutions against Bashar al-Assad in several European
countries.
The new claim, made by the State Department’s ambassador at large for war crimes, Stephen Rapp, in an interview with me, is based on a newly completed FBI analysis of 27,000 photographs smuggled out of Syria by the former military photographer known as “Caesar.” The photos show evidence of the torture and murder of over 11,000 civilians in custody. The FBI spent months pouring over the photos and comparing them to consular databases with images of citizens from countries around the world.
Last month, the FBI gave the State Department its report, which included a group of photos that had been tentatively matched to individuals who were already in U.S. government files. “The group included multiple individuals who were non-Syrian, but none who had a birthplace in the United States, according to our information,” Rapp told me. “There were Europeans within that group.”
The implications could be huge for the international drive to prosecute Assad and other top Syrian officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. While it’s unlikely that multilateral organizations such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court will pursue cases against Assad in the near term, due to opposition by Assad’s allies including Russia, legal cases against the regime could be brought in individual countries whose citizens were victims of torture and murder.
Rapp declined to say which European countries’ citizens were found in the Caesar files, but said that there could be many more European and international citizens identified as the work to analyze the photos continues. Meanwhile, the drive to begin prosecutions against Assad and his cronies in European countries can now move forward.
Read more: U.S. Says Europeans Tortured by Assad's Death Machine - Bloomberg View
The new claim, made by the State Department’s ambassador at large for war crimes, Stephen Rapp, in an interview with me, is based on a newly completed FBI analysis of 27,000 photographs smuggled out of Syria by the former military photographer known as “Caesar.” The photos show evidence of the torture and murder of over 11,000 civilians in custody. The FBI spent months pouring over the photos and comparing them to consular databases with images of citizens from countries around the world.
Last month, the FBI gave the State Department its report, which included a group of photos that had been tentatively matched to individuals who were already in U.S. government files. “The group included multiple individuals who were non-Syrian, but none who had a birthplace in the United States, according to our information,” Rapp told me. “There were Europeans within that group.”
The implications could be huge for the international drive to prosecute Assad and other top Syrian officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. While it’s unlikely that multilateral organizations such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court will pursue cases against Assad in the near term, due to opposition by Assad’s allies including Russia, legal cases against the regime could be brought in individual countries whose citizens were victims of torture and murder.
Rapp declined to say which European countries’ citizens were found in the Caesar files, but said that there could be many more European and international citizens identified as the work to analyze the photos continues. Meanwhile, the drive to begin prosecutions against Assad and his cronies in European countries can now move forward.
Read more: U.S. Says Europeans Tortured by Assad's Death Machine - Bloomberg View
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