That is why the efforts of lawyers like Syrian human rights attorney Anwar al-Bunni are so much appreciated by revolution activists like Khaled Rawas who slipped out of Syria after his release from an Assad prison with a vow to continue the fight wherever he ended up trying to rebuild his life.
Both Rawas and his wife had been arrested during a peaceful demonstration in their hometown of Damascus in December 2011 and released in 2012.
As the regime’s brutality continued to escalate they made the difficult decision to leave the country which Rawas believes suited Assad’s intents and purposes just fine.
Rawas told Orient Net that the regime was already actively engaged in changing the demographics of Syria’s capital city in Assad’s favor even before the revolution began.
Kawas, now 29, said he had watched Iranian Shias moving into the city at Assad’s invitation and were given Syrian passports so his regime could count them for their own self-serving purposes as Syrian citizens.
Secular and Sunni Syrians living in Damascus were also offered 10,000 Syrian pounds and regular deliveries of food baskets to their homes if they would be willing to convert to Shia Islam in order to increase their numbers.
Shias from Iran were also trying to buy up marketplace businesses that in some cases had been run by Syrian families for generations.
When the offers to buy were turned down, mysterious overnight fires would occur that would wipe out entire inventories forcing the original owners to walk away leaving their devastated businesses to be taken over by the foreigners anyways.
Recently Rawas and his wife joined a landmark legal complaint in Germany as part of a joint effort on behalf of seven Syrian refugees to obtain even a modicum of the justice that has for too long proved elusive for the victims of Assad’s war on the people of Syria.
As members of the Syrian opposition, families of the Assad regime’s victims and human rights activists see their hopes that the brutal regime will be toppled and held accountable for its multitude of war crimes begin to fade, they are increasingly pursuing justice on their own through criminal lawsuits being filed in domestic European courts.
Left with no alternatives they are gambling on the notion of ‘universal jurisdiction’ and the argument that war crimes that break international humanitarian laws are not bound by geographic boundaries.
Countries such as Germany — where Rawas now lives with his wife and daughter — are ideal places to initiate such legal actions due to their broad laws covering torture and genocide.
“Our fear is that they’re going to get away with it, that the international community is going to look the other way,” Rawas told Zaman al Wasl earlier this month. “I don’t want revenge. But for what was done, for what is still being done, we have to have justice.”
The complaint filed on behalf of the seven Syrians is directed at six senior regime officials who the Syrian plaintiffs claim were directly involved in systematic torture in Assad’s jails.
Investigations conducted by Amnesty International came to the determination that at least 17,723 people died, and thousands of other dissidents were brutally tortured, while under detention in Syria between March 2011 and December 2015.
And while there have been many international condemnations of the Assad regime by UN Security Council members and others, there have been virtually no successful international efforts to prosecute any of its members for war crimes.
Khaled told Orient Net that when the revolution began in 2011 his father’s generation had warned the young activists that they “did not know what the Assad regime was capable of.”
Even so it was unthinkable that the international community would just stand by and watch Assad’s loyalists torture and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and destroy so much of the country without intervening.
The sad reality for the regime’s victims is that the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has successfully prosecuted war crimes elsewhere, is unable to accept cases from Syria because the country is not a signatory to the treaty that established the court.
To even launch an investigation the ICC would need the approval of the U.N. Security Council — a move Russia has repeatedly blocked with its unrestricted power to veto.
The bottom line is that Assad and his supporters are very good at playing the political game in ways that allow them to break international laws and get away with it.
So human rights lawyers, activists and victims have been forced to “get creative” as Khaled told Orient Net.
The case that was recently filed in Germany on behalf of the seven refugees is at least the fourth case to be filed in Europe and will most likely not be the last.
But unlike the other cases, this one involves Syrian refugees living in Germany who claim to have been directly victimized by senior intelligence and military officials who were named in the suit — and who may not be covered by international laws granting sovereign immunity to a head of state like Assad.
Although these lawsuits may prove to be nothing more than a shot in the dark when it comes to achieving real justice for Syrian victims, just being able to participate in the process has proven to be cathartic for people such as Rawas.
“It’s not just about saving Syrians in Syria,” Khaled told Orient Net. “It’s about saving the humanity in all of us.”
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