Transitional justice continues to be part of national and international conversations around Syria. It appears in discussions about truth-seeking, accountability, missing persons, reparations, memorialization, institutional reform, and guarantees of non-recurrence. This matters. After decades in which Syrians were forced to carry the burden of truth-telling, documentation, memory, and accountability largely outside their own country, justice is now being discussed as part of Syria’s political future. But the current opening is fragile. The field remains politically sensitive and institutionally uncertain, and it is shaped by unequal access, survivor mistrust, security concerns, competing narratives, and the risk that justice processes become centralized, symbolic, or disconnected from affected communities.
One of the central questions facing Syria now is whether the emerging justice architecture can earn the trust of those in whose name it is being built: survivors, families of the disappeared, victims of forced displacement and collective violence, and other affected communities. For Syrians, transitional justice is a question about whether families will know the fate of their loved ones, whether those responsible will be held accountable, and whether the structures that enabled violence will be transformed.
In May 2025, Reuters reported that presidential decrees had established national bodies for transitional justice and missing persons. These steps may create openings, but they also raise concerns about mandate, independence, inclusiveness, sequencing, and public trust. Human Rights Watch, for example, warned that the transitional justice decree’s focus on crimes committed by the Assad government risks excluding victims of abuses by non-state actors. Syrian civil society organizations have also raised concerns about the broader constitutional and decree-based framework, including the concentration of executive power and the need for judicial independence and meaningful legislative oversight, as reflected in this joint statement.
These concerns go to the heart of whether this process in Syria will be perceived as a national process of truth, accountability, and repair, or as a state-led instrument that selectively recognizes some harms while marginalizing others. I write from my work with Syrian survivor groups, documentation actors, and civil society organizations, where I have seen how quickly trust can be lost when justice is designed above the heads of those most affected.
A Justice Ecosystem Built Before the Transition
Long before the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, Syrians had already built a justice ecosystem under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Families of the disappeared organized and demanded truth, including through a Truth and Justice Charter. Survivors of detention testified, advocated, and challenged the silence surrounding torture. Syrian human rights organizations documented violations, preserved evidence, supported universal jurisdiction cases, and built legal and advocacy strategies across borders. Journalists, artists, lawyers, feminist groups, local activists, and memory initiatives resisted erasure in different ways. International mechanisms, including the Independent International Commission of Inquiry (CoI), the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), and later the Independent Institution on Missing Persons (IIMP), became part of a broader accountability landscape shaped in large part by Syrian insistence that impunity should not be normalized.
This history matters because it changes the starting point: transitional justice in Syria is not being introduced into a vacuum. It is entering a field already marked by sacrifice, knowledge, pain, and political disagreement. Many survivors and families have spent years refining their understanding of justice. They know the difference between being merely consulted and actually being heard, between symbolic inclusion and real influence, and between a process that extracts testimony and one that protects agency.
Any national justice process that fails to recognize this existing ecosystem risks reproducing one of the deep wounds of Syrian public life: the treatment of people as subjects to be managed rather than citizens with the right to shape decisions that affect them.
The interim Syrian authorities, therefore, face a foundational choice. They can treat survivor associations, families’ groups, local civil society, women’s organizations, documentation actors, and displaced communities as audiences to be informed after decisions are made. Or they can treat them as political and ethical partners in defining what justice must mean in this transition. Only the second path can build the trust needed for durable change.
When Victim-Centered Justice Changes Power Relations
Transitional justice can fail even when specific institutions for its advancement are created. It can fail when mandates are too narrow, when consultations are performative, when political authorities control the pace and limits of truth, and when victims are invited to speak but not to shape decisions.
This risk is acute in Syria because the scale of violations is vast, the social fabric has been violently fragmented, and the political transition remains uncertain. It is still unclear whether the emerging state will move decisively away from authoritarian habits, whether institutions will be reformed in ways that constrain executive power, and whether temporary arrangements will open the way toward genuinely inclusive and rights-respecting governance. A top-down process may produce strategies, public meetings, and legal frameworks, but if it does not create credible channels for active participation by Syrians and result in meaningful accountability, it will deepen mistrust.
The language of victim-centered justice can itself become dangerous when it is used without changing power relations. Victims and survivors should not be asked to provide emotional legitimacy to decisions made elsewhere. Families of the missing should not be repeatedly invited to tell their stories without receiving clear answers about what will happen with the information they provide. Women survivors should not be included only as symbols of suffering while being excluded from the design of reparations, truth-seeking, and institutional reform. Local communities should not be asked to participate in consultations whose outcomes are neither published nor reflected in policy.
For many Syrians, the state was not absent during the years of violence. It was present as a source of fear, surveillance, humiliation, confiscation, detention, and death. This means that state-led transitional justice must work harder to prove that it is not merely a new language for old habits. It must show, through practice, that it is willing to listen, to disclose, to be constrained by law, and to share decision-making space.
Legitimacy Is Built in Practice
Legal mandate is necessary, but it is not sufficient. A transitional justice body may exist under a decree or constitutional provision and still lack legitimacy in the eyes of affected communities. In the Syrian context, legitimacy will depend on multiple conditions. The mandate must be clear, public, and inclusive. Syrians need to know which violations are covered, which time periods are included, which actors fall within the scope, and how different categories of victims will be recognized. A process that addresses only some perpetrators or only some victims will not produce a shared sense of justice. Accountability for the crimes of the Assad regime is essential. But it is also not the whole story of Syria’s violence.
Transitional justice bodies need protection from executive interference, transparent appointment procedures, clear conflict-of-interest rules, and public reporting obligations. They also need relationships with the judiciary that strengthen, rather than weaken, due process and judicial independence. Without this, the process risks becoming a political instrument rather than a rights-based practice. Participation must move beyond consultation and public relations. It must give affected communities influence over priorities, sequencing, methods, safeguards, and evaluation. Syria does not need endless listening sessions that generate no visible change. It needs structured, protected, and representative forms of engagement through which survivors, families, civil society, and local communities can see how their input shapes decisions. In my work with Syrian survivor groups, documentation actors, and civil society organizations, I have repeatedly seen that trust is lost both when institutions fail to listen, and when they listen without explaining what will change as a result.
Protection, Material Change, and the Missing Persons File
Survivor and family engagement is crucial to a successful transitional justice framework in Syria, but protection must be built into every step. This is also reflected in the IIMP’s victim-centered approach, which emphasizes the rights, agency, wellbeing, safety, security, dignity, and meaningful participation of survivors and families. Asking individuals to speak about violations in a fragile transition can expose them to re-traumatization, stigma, retaliation, or political instrumentalization. Ethical engagement requires informed consent, confidentiality, psychosocial sensitivity, secure data systems, referral pathways, and a clear explanation of what participation can and cannot achieve.
Transitional justice must also be connected to material and institutional change. Syrians do not need isolated mechanisms competing for attention. They need a process in which truth-seeking informs accountability, accountability opens pathways to redress, reparations acknowledge both material and moral harms, and institutional reform addresses the structures that made violence possible. Missing persons, property rights, security sector reform, judicial reform, memorialization, and guarantees of non-recurrence should be treated as connected parts of one public justice effort, not as separate technical files.
No issue illustrates the stakes more clearly than the file of the missing and forcibly disappeared. For families, the question of the missing is not one file among many; it is the wound around which daily life has been organized for years. It shapes grief, inheritance, property, marriage, displacement, legal status, mental health, and political belonging. It is also one of the clearest tests of whether the new authorities are willing to confront the machinery of disappearance and disclose what the state knows.
The establishment of a national body for missing persons is an important step, but families will not judge such a body by its title. They will judge it by whether it provides answers, protects information, coordinates with existing Syrian and international documentation efforts, treats families as rights-holders, and avoids turning their suffering into a public relations exercise.
This requires practical choices. Families’ associations should have formal advisory roles. Data protocols should be transparent and rights-based. Coordination with the IIMP should be serious and sustained. Exhumations, DNA analysis, and identification of human remains should follow recognized standards, including the ICRC’s guidance on missing people, DNA analysis, and identification of human remains. Families should be regularly informed, even when answers are incomplete. The state should preserve, secure, and disclose relevant archives. Above all, the missing persons file should not be subordinated to narrow political reconciliation. There can be no meaningful reconciliation built on the continued disappearance of human beings.
What International Support Should and Should Not Do
International actors have an important role to play, but they also carry risks. Donors, governments, U.N. agencies, and international NGOs often move quickly in transitional moments. They seek entry points, institutional partners, capacity-building projects, and visible outputs. Some of this support may be necessary. But if it is not carefully designed, it can distort the process.
International supporters should avoid rewarding form over substance. The existence of a commission, strategy, or consultation plan should not be treated as evidence of meaningful progress by the interim authorities unless accompanied by independence, inclusion, transparency, and protection. Funding should not incentivize rushed outreach that exposes victims and communities to harm.
International actors should also resist the temptation to centralize everything in Damascus. Syria’s justice demands are spread across geography and displacement. They exist inside Syria, in refugee communities, in the diaspora, in former detention networks, in women-led initiatives, in local councils, in civil society archives, and in families’ associations, including those that helped develop the Truth and Justice Charter and those engaging with the IIMP. Supporting transitional justice means supporting the connective tissue between these actors, not only the formal institutions that claim to represent the process.
This is particularly important because the future of Syria’s transition will not be decided only by elite negotiations or legal texts. It will also be decided by whether communities begin to believe that the new order recognizes their pain, protects their rights, and limits the power of those who govern.
Immediate Steps for the Interim Syrian Authorities
If the interim Syrian authorities want transitional justice to become a source of trust rather than another arena of contestation, immediate steps are needed.
The interim authorities should publish clear mandates, internal procedures, selection criteria, and workplans for the transitional justice and missing persons bodies. Ambiguity in a low-trust environment produces suspicion.
They also need to establish formal survivor and family advisory councils with real influence, not ceremonial status. These councils must include families of the disappeared, survivors of detention, women survivors, representatives of displaced communities, victims from different regions and backgrounds, and organizations with long-standing justice expertise.
Creating a public engagement protocol is vital. Every consultation should have a clear purpose, informed consent procedures, protection measures, documentation rules, and a commitment to share back findings with participants. Communities need to know why they are being consulted and how their views will be used.
The interim authorities should also clarify the relationship between transitional justice and criminal accountability. Truth-seeking should not become a substitute for prosecution where prosecution is possible. At the same time, criminal accountability should be pursued with due process, judicial independence, and a clear strategy that avoids both selective justice and unrealistic promises.
The interim authorities should adopt a phased reparations approach. Syria cannot repair all harms immediately, but it can begin with urgent interim measures: legal recognition, documentation support, psychosocial and medical assistance, education support for victims’ families, property-related remedies, and public acknowledgment. Reparations should not be postponed until the end of a perfect process.
Archives and evidence must also be protected. Security, intelligence, prison, court, land, and administrative records may be central to truth, accountability, missing persons, and property claims. Their preservation is a national justice priority.
Transitional justice will not deliver everything quickly. False promises will damage trust. A credible process should tell Syrians what can be done now, what will take time, what remains uncertain, and what safeguards are being built.
Strategic International Funding and Coordination
International supporters need to align their assistance with the same principles.
They should condition support to transitional justice institutions on transparency, inclusiveness, independence, and victim-centered safeguards. This does not mean disengagement; it means principled engagement.
It is crucial to fund survivor-led and family-led organizations directly, including those working outside the capital and in displacement contexts. These groups are knowledge producers, accountability actors, and guardians of public trust, as Syrian victim and family associations have repeatedly demonstrated through initiatives such as the Truth and Justice Charter.
Support is also needed for secure documentation, data protection, forensic capacity, psychosocial care, legal aid, and community-based participation. These are the infrastructure of meaningful justice, and they are especially important in a context where archives, mass grave sites, detention records, and family testimony may all become part of future truth-seeking, missing persons, and accountability processes.
International supporters need to coordinate among themselves to avoid duplication and competition. Syria does not need fragmented donor projects that create parallel justice conversations. It needs coherent support that strengthens national and community-level capacities while preserving independence.
They should continue supporting international accountability pathways, including universal jurisdiction and cooperation with international mechanisms. Domestic justice efforts are important, but they cannot carry the entire burden alone, especially in the early phase of transition.
Finally, international actors need to listen more carefully to Syrian debates. Too often, external engagement treats Syrian civil society as a source of information rather than a source of judgment. The difference matters.
Conclusion
Transitional justice in Syria is about dealing with the past as well as about renegotiating the relationship between people and power. Under Assad, violence was physical, but it was also a system of enforced silence, fear, dispossession, humiliation, and denial. The U.N. Commission of Inquiry’s reporting on detention and disappearance is one illustration of how deeply state violence was tied to the control of truth itself. A credible justice process must reverse that relationship by returning truth to the public and voice to those who were silenced.
This is why architecture alone will not be enough. It can still fail if people experience it as distant, selective, unsafe, or politically controlled. But if these institutions are built with humility, transparency, and real participation, they can become more than bureaucratic structures. They can become part of a new civic contract.
For transitional justice to matter in Syria, it must move from architecture to trust. And trust begins when those who suffered most are no longer asked merely to tell their stories but are given the power to shape what justice will do with them.
