Because Syria’s government had
not signed onto the Rome Statute, which renders governments and their respective
officials subject to the International Criminal Court, including its arrest
warrants and verdicts, Bashar al-Assad and his younger brother, Mahar, who were
then in absentia under Putin’s protection in Russia, were not subject to the
ICC when a Syrian court found the two brothers guilty of crimes against
humanity and war crimes on August 11, 2026. The two men could evade the death
sentences issued by their own country’s judiciary as long as they could be
protected by the Russian president in Russia. Although an Israeli court had
tried and convicted the Nazi Eichmann of crimes against humanity, so a precedent
existed for national courts adjudicating that crime, the fact that Israel had
to illegally kidnap Eichmann in Argentina and the al-Assad brothers could evade
being held accountable for their horrendous crimes in Syria suggests that the right,
proper, and effective court to hear cases on crimes against humanity, as well
as war crimes, is international, such as the ICC. That court’s weakness,
however, as in Syria, Russia, and Israel not being subject to that court’s
jurisdiction, points to a hole in jurisprudence on crimes against humanity,
assuming that the proper and necessary jurisdiction is rightly international
rather than national. With the U.S. having recently announced a full-on attack
on the ICC (and its prosecutors) at the behest of the indicted suspect Prime
Minister Netanyahu of Israel, it could be asked whether the ICC was in a
position to “fill the hole” in the jurisprudence of crimes against humanity
(and war crimes), or whether a coalition of the willing of national governments
would have to start from scratch to construct a new international criminal court
(and block diplomacy and trade with any country not willing to be bound by the
new international jurisprudence). The judicial case against the al-Assad
brothers (and their maternal cousin, who was in the courtroom and thus
could be held accountable by the national court for having led the 2011 Daraa
crackdown) demonstrates the value in shoring up international jurisprudence on
crimes against humanity (and war crimes).
The full essay is at "Syria's Bashar al-Assad."
