- Documents reveal regime’s involvement in violations of international criminal and humanitarian law, including mass arrests, interrogations, detentions, torture, and disappearances, says CIJA’s Nerma Jelacic
- ‘The focus now is to preserve this evidence and the documents ... to process them inside Syria, so that future actors can use them in the accountability processes,’ Jelacic tells Anadolu
ISTANBUL
Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, a dedicated team of Syrian men and women has been quietly working behind the scenes to collect, preserve, and analyze evidence of atrocities committed by the Bashar Assad regime.
This painstaking effort, spearheaded by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) – a non-profit, non-governmental organization – aims to bring perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity to justice.
The CIJA has amassed more than 1 million pages of official documents produced by the Syrian regime. These papers provide a rare and detailed glimpse into the inner workings of Assad’s government, revealing how state institutions were mobilized to suppress dissent and maintain control through widespread violence and intimidation.
With the fall of the regime, the CIJA now hopes that this extensive archive will be used in future international accountability and justice processes.
“Since Dec. 8, the whole regime has collapsed, so the totality of the documentation has become available, and there is hope that Syria will successfully transition into a post-Assad democratic state,” Nerma Jelacic, CIJA’s director for management and external relations, told Anadolu.
“There is hope that those future accountability and justice processes will be happening in Syria.”
The CIJA’s work began with a clear and ambitious objective: to systematically document the crimes committed by the Assad regime and trace responsibility to the highest levels of government.
“The aim was for us, with our Syrian colleagues, to document the crimes committed by Assad regime, but in particular to connect those crimes that the media and human rights activists were reporting to high-ranking officials,” Jelacic explains.
By linking the brutal suppression of demonstrators and widespread human rights abuses to regime policies and orders, the CIJA seeks to prove that these were not isolated incidents but part of a systematic campaign orchestrated by top officials in Damascus.
‘Crimes documented by the perpetrator’s own hand’
The bulk of the evidence collected by the CIJA comes from Syria’s security intelligence agencies – institutions that played a central role in the regime’s repression of dissent.
These documents detail the inner workings of a state machinery bent on crushing opposition through surveillance, mass arrests, torture, and disappearances.
“These are orders, policies, interrogation reports, arrest lists, and also the bureaucracy of the crackdown – how it worked, how payments were made, how people were moved,” Jelacic elaborates.
This trove of documents provides evidence of crimes ranging from enforced disappearances and persecution to torture, sexual violence, and inhumane treatment, actions that are classified as crimes against humanity and war crimes under international law.
“From enforced disappearances, persecution, torture, sexual violence, and sexual offenses, inhumane treatment, all of these crimes are documented by the perpetrator’s own hand,” Jelacic emphasizes.
For years, she added, survivors’ testimonies and media reports have provided harrowing accounts of the Assad regime’s brutality, and these official documents offer irrefutable proof that such crimes were part of a systematic strategy approved at the highest levels of government.
“What’s important about these documents is that ... this is in the perpetrator’s own hand. It confirms that these are not just isolated crimes happening at one checkpoint or at one detention facility or to 10 people,” Jelacic says.
“It confirms that this is part of a wide machinery of policymaking that was done at the highest levels in Damascus and signed off by Bashar Assad himself.”
Collecting and preserving this evidence has been an exceptionally dangerous task, with CIJA investigators risking their lives to smuggle documents out of Syria and protect the integrity of their work.
When the group started their work 14 years ago, there was no safe way of keeping these documents inside Syria, said Jelacic.
“So, we had to find ways to extract them to Europe where we would process them, digitize them, and then analyze them and use them for accountability justice purposes.”
The collection of evidence was an “extremely dangerous mission,” Jelacic said, adding that investigators faced numerous security threats, as well as misinformation and disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining their work.
How the evidence is being used
The vast archive gathered by the CIJA has already played a crucial role in legal proceedings across Europe and North America.
Courts in Germany, France, the US, the Netherlands, and several Scandinavian countries have relied on CIJA evidence to prosecute individuals linked to the Syrian regime, said Jelacic.
“A number of trials, or basically every major trial in Europe that has happened, has relied on this evidence,” she added.
One notable case involved the family of slain American journalist Marie Colvin, who successfully sued the Syrian government and Bashar Assad in a US court.
However, despite these successes, the path to comprehensive justice remains challenging.
“When we started in 2011 ... the international community talked about referring the Syrian situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC). These efforts at the UN level, Security Council level, were thwarted by vetoes of Russia and China. So, the ICC route was kind of closed from 2015 onwards,” said Jelacic.
The failure to refer Syria to the ICC closed a vital avenue for international justice, forcing reliance on national courts and universal jurisdiction laws, primarily in Europe.
Challenges on long road to justice
The CIJA continues to focus on securing more evidence of the regime's involvement in violations of international criminal and humanitarian law.
However, operating in Syria remains perilous, while another challenge is the limits on engagement with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that has emerged as the new power in Syria but remains designated as a terrorist organization by international actors including the US.
“We cannot engage, for example, with HTS, and this prevents us from having a comprehensive overall approach to the whole country in terms of helping Syria preserve all of this evidence,” Jelacic says.
She emphasized the urgency of the situation. Documents are at risk of being destroyed, stolen, or even sold by opportunistic actors.
“The more time passes, the more information we are getting from different parts of the country where these documents are being destroyed or being pillaged, or even some actors that are going in and getting them and then trying to profit from them by selling them. So, time really is of the essence,” she said.
Jelacic stressed that achieving justice will require sustained cooperation between Syrian actors and the international community.
“The focus now is to preserve this evidence and the documents ... to process them inside Syria so that future actors can use them in the accountability processes,” she said.
“Each one of these documents tells part of the story, part of the history of what the Syrian regime did not only after 2011 but also before that. Let’s remember, the human rights violations have been happening for many decades there.”
As Syria stands on the brink of significant political change, the CIJA’s work offers hope for future justice and reconciliation. However, Jelacic acknowledges that accountability will require more than just criminal prosecutions.
“There has to be a more comprehensive approach ... like finding what happened to the disappeared, finding the missing people, finding the bodies, identifying the bodies, getting the historical record right, and using that record not to further divide this.”
