On Aug. 11, 2026, the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus delivered a judgment that would have been almost unimaginable less than two years earlier. Former President Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher al-Assad, former Political Security Chief Atef Najib, and six others were convicted of crimes arising from the violent repression that began in Daraa in 2011. Assad and most of the other defendants were tried in absentia. Najib, who had been in custody and appeared before the Court throughout the proceedings, was sentenced to death, as were Bashar and Maher. Since then, the Court has sentenced Wassim al-Assad, a cousin of the former president and alleged militia leader, to death, while former Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassoun has been sentenced to life imprisonment.
These judgments were historic. They were also deeply imperfect. The imposition of capital punishment raises serious human rights concerns. Trials in absentia demand particular procedural safeguards. Questions remain about defense rights and, critically, how courts operating under Syrian criminal legislation – which does not contain a comprehensive framework for international crimes – can address mass atrocity while respecting the principle of legality.
These concerns require scrutiny. But they also raise a broader question: what should follow from them?
One response is to conclude that credible accountability ultimately requires a different forum: the International Criminal Court (ICC), a hybrid tribunal, or continued reliance on third-party state prosecutions abroad. Yet this risks overlooking both a central principle of transitional justice and an important opportunity created by Syria’s political transition. Transitional justice is concerned not simply with prosecuting yesterday’s crimes, but with transforming the institutions through which a society will govern itself tomorrow. In Syria, that necessarily includes the courts.
The relevant question is therefore not whether Syria’s first domestic proceedings meet the standards of a mature international tribunal. They plainly do not. It is whether international engagement can support the transformation of Syrian courts into institutions increasingly capable of delivering independent and rights-respecting justice.
From Courts of Repression to Courts of Accountability
Syria has not emerged from five decades of authoritarian government with an independent judiciary conveniently waiting to administer transitional justice. Under the Assad governments, exceptional courts and security legislation were used to suppress political opposition, while torture, enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention occurred on an extraordinary scale without meaningful judicial remedy. Syria’s transition must therefore address an enormous body of past crimes while transforming institutions that were never designed – and frequently were not permitted – to hold the state accountable.
Syrian criminal law compounds that challenge. It criminalizes murder, torture and unlawful detention, but was not constructed to address widespread or systematic state repression. International criminal law provides tools for doing so, including crimes against humanity and modes of liability, such as command responsibility, capable of addressing responsibility within larger institutional structures. Syrian judges are therefore being asked to determine criminal responsibility for crimes for which domestic legislation provides an incomplete framework, creating both questions of legality and an opportunity for institutional transformation.
Since early 2026, Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) has worked with Syrian judges through the Higher Judicial Training Institute and Ministry of Justice on the practical application of international criminal law, including international crimes, evidentiary analysis, modes of liability, and case-building. Several Syrian judges involved in armed conflict-related proceedings have participated. Syrian courts will have to confront these questions whether international actors engage with them or not. The choice is whether international expertise effectively supports the Syrians who are developing the answers.
National Ownership and Imperfect Justice
National ownership has long been a central principle of transitional justice. United Nations (UN) guidance emphasizes that transitional justice processes should be context-specific, nationally-owned, and responsive to the needs of affected societies. This reflects an understanding that accountability is concerned not only with punishment for past crimes, but with the institutions through which justice will continue to be delivered after the transition itself has ended. That principle has particular resonance in Syria. In 2025, the head of the U.N.’s International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism described the preferred destination of the accountability process as “justice in Syria by Syrians for Syrians”: a Syrian-led process supported by international expertise. The National Commission for Transitional Justice has emphasized the importance of localizing international expertise within national institutions while ensuring that Syrians themselves lead the transitional justice process.
Supporting national ownership does not require international actors to endorse whatever national institutions choose to do. To be credible, a nationally-owned process requires judicial independence, meaningful participation by victims and civil society, transparency, and procedural fairness. It must also confront concerns about selectivity: a transitional justice process incapable of addressing serious crimes committed by actors other than the former government will struggle to establish lasting legitimacy. But these are standards against which domestic accountability should develop, not necessarily reasons to abandon it.
Comparative experience offers no exact analogue for Syria. In Bosnia and Rwanda, international tribunals were established early and operated alongside domestic accountability processes. As those processes developed, international institutions progressively invested in strengthening national courts capable of assuming greater responsibility for atrocity prosecutions. Colombia presents a different trajectory: its transitional justice architecture emerged principally from a nationally negotiated process, but against the background of a considerably stronger domestic judiciary and sustained scrutiny by the ICC.
Syria begins from a different position. There is no international tribunal exercising jurisdiction over the principal crimes committed during the conflict, no formal ICC scrutiny, and domestic courts have begun proceedings before a comprehensive legal framework for prosecuting international crimes has been put in place. Rather than international responsibility being progressively transferred to national institutions, Syrian courts are effectively beginning at the domestic end of that sequence.
The comparisons nevertheless demonstrate something narrower but important: international standards and national ownership need not be competing propositions. Even where the international community initially placed responsibility for atrocity prosecutions in international institutions, sustainable accountability ultimately required investment in domestic judicial capacity.
The experience of the former Yugoslavia is particularly instructive in this respect. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was never expected to prosecute every person responsible for crimes committed during the conflicts. As its work progressed, the ability of national jurisdictions to conduct complex war-crimes proceedings became increasingly important. The ICTY, OSCE, European Union and others invested in strengthening domestic capacity, including through training judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers, transferring evidence and expertise, and strengthening witness support. The ICTY ultimately described the ability of local judiciaries to continue adjudicating war-crimes cases according to international standards as a “cornerstone of the Tribunal’s legacy.”
The relevance for Syria is therefore not that it should reproduce Bosnia’s institutional trajectory. It cannot: there is no Syrian equivalent of the ICTY from which cases, expertise, and responsibility can gradually be transferred. The lesson is instead that international criminal justice has itself recognised the limits of permanent externalization. However sophisticated international mechanisms may be, long-term accountability ultimately depends upon national judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and institutions capable of applying international standards themselves.
The Death Penalty
The death sentences imposed by the Fourth Criminal Court present perhaps the clearest challenge to such engagement, at least from certain international actors. However, supporting the development of domestic accountability does not require international actors to accept every feature of the legal system through which accountability is being pursued. The question is how opposition to the death penalty should shape that engagement.
Syria remains a retentionist state. It is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), but not the Second Optional Protocol aimed at abolition of the death penalty. International law therefore places stringent restrictions on Syria’s use of capital punishment without imposing upon it the treaty obligation of abolition that applies to States Parties to the Second Optional Protocol.
Article 6 of the ICCPR restricts capital punishment in retentionist states to the “most serious crimes.” Some of the crimes prosecuted in the current Syrian proceedings undoubtedly fall within the narrow category for which the ICCPR does not prohibit capital punishment. But this is a ceiling on permissible use, not an endorsement of execution. Article 6 also expressly preserves the possibility of abolition, and the Human Rights Committee has interpreted the right to life as requiring non-abolitionist states to move towards the complete eradication of the death penalty, while insisting on the strictest fair-trial protections wherever it remains available. International actors therefore have strong grounds to press Syria towards non-execution and possibly eventual abolition, as well as to advocate for rigorous review and full procedural protection. The more difficult question is what consequences Syria’s retention of the death penalty should have for international engagement with its domestic accountability process.
Rwanda offers an instructive, although importantly different, example. Domestic genocide prosecutions proceeded alongside the ICTR while Rwanda retained capital punishment. International engagement with Rwanda’s domestic justice system began well before abolition. By 2005, the ICTR was training legal professionals and discussing with national authorities both the eventual transfer of cases and the international assistance required to strengthen Rwanda’s justice sector. Its 2006 reporting described capacity-building for Rwandan legal practitioners as a central component of its outreach program. At the same time, capital punishment remained a significant obstacle to transferring ICTR cases to Rwanda and to extradition from other states. Rwanda first enacted legislation excluding the death penalty for cases transferred from the ICTR or other states in March 2007 and, in July 2007, abolished capital punishment altogether. Abolition removed one important obstacle to transfers, although concerns over fair trial guarantees continued to delay them.
The comparison should not be overstated. Syria has no equivalent international tribunal from which cases might eventually be transferred, and international actors consequently possess different platforms from which to advocate. But Rwanda illustrates a relevant principle: serious incompatibilities between a domestic justice system and international human rights standards need not present a choice between accepting those practices and abandoning domestic accountability altogether. Indeed, the capacity-building undertaken in Rwanda while it retained capital punishment demonstrates that the U.N.’s longstanding commitment not to establish or directly participate in tribunals permitting the death penalty does not preclude engagement aimed at strengthening domestic justice institutions. Engagement can instead be used to press for reform while strengthening the capacity of national institutions to deliver credible justice.
The lesson is not that the death penalty should be tolerated as an inevitable feature of transition. It is that engagement can itself provide opportunity for change. There is also a question of social legitimacy. Many Syrians understandably demand severe punishment for officials associated with decades of repression and mass violence. Public celebrations surrounding the August judgment demonstrate the profound symbolic importance, at least among sections of Syrian society, of seeing members of the former ruling family subjected to Syrian law.
Popular sentiment cannot determine fair trial rights or override international human rights obligations. Transitional justice cannot become majoritarian vengeance. But international actors should equally be cautious about assuming that their preferred model of punishment is the sole measure of whether justice is regarded as meaningful by the society concerned. The appropriate response is critical engagement: opposition to execution and advocacy for abolition alongside continued support for the development of credible domestic justice.
Legitimacy and the Alternatives
The ICC possesses obvious institutional advantages: a developed framework for international crimes and modes of liability, established procedural protections, and no capital punishment. But the ICC should not be treated as a model of perfect justice. It has itself faced criticism over aspects of its own procedures, including the length of proceedings and their implications for the right of an accused to be tried without undue delay. International criminal proceedings are, of course, exceptionally complex, and delay does not by itself render a trial inherently unfair. But the experience of the ICC reinforces a broader point: institutional sophistication is not synonymous with procedural perfection, still less with transitional legitimacy.
For Syrian victims, legitimacy may also derive from proximity, participation, and ownership. For Syrian lawyers, it can mean litigating crimes of the former government before their own courts. For the Syrian judiciary, it requires demonstrating that state institutions can apply law against those who once exercised state power. After decades during which victims could not realistically seek protection from the justice system against the security apparatus, there is particular significance in compelling that system to recognize state violence as criminal. Proceedings in The Hague, Koblenz or Paris – however important – cannot perform that institutional function inside Syria.
Nor is the ICC presently a substitute for Syrian proceedings. Syria is not a State Party to the Rome Statute; the 2014 Security Council referral was vetoed; and although the new authorities could accept the Court’s jurisdiction, there is little indication as yet that they intend to do so. A hybrid tribunal would likewise require political agreement, legislation, institutional design, financing, and time. Meanwhile, Syrian proceedings already exist.
Universal jurisdiction cases should continue and international investigative mechanisms remain indispensable. Future international or hybrid involvement should not be excluded. But the practical choice facing international actors today is less “Damascus versus The Hague” than engagement versus disengagement from the accountability process actually taking place.
Engagement Is Not Endorsement
International support for Syrian domestic justice should be demanding. It should press for meaningful defense representation, rigorous evidentiary standards, reasoned and publicly accessible judgments, judicial independence, victim and witness protection, and meaningful appellate review. Support should extend to defense lawyers as well as prosecutors and judges. International engagement should also encourage Syria to adopt an explicit legislative framework for international crimes and continue to challenge both capital punishment and the selectivity of the broader accountability process.
These conditions do not make international support contradictory. They explain its purpose. If Syrian judges lack experience applying modes of liability developed to address mass atrocities, expertise can help them gain fluency in both the reach and limits of those modes of liability. If evidentiary analysis is weak, technical assistance can strengthen it. If defense capacity is inadequate, it can be supported. If judicial reasoning lacks transparency, monitoring and engagement can press for better practice.
Disengagement will not prevent Syrian courts from adjudicating these cases; it will, however, reduce international actors’ opportunities to positively impact how they do so. For years, accountability for Syrian crimes had to be pursued outside Syria because meaningful justice inside the country was impossible. The political transition has created something fundamentally new: the possibility that Syrian institutions themselves might become vehicles for accountability.
Transitional justice does not begin once institutions have already been transformed. Institutional transformation is part of transitional justice. The international community should scrutinize Syria’s domestic proceedings, note their shortcomings and condition support where necessary. But it should not mistake the imperfections of an emerging justice system for proof that justice must be delivered somewhere else.
The question is not whether Syrian courts already resemble The Hague. It is whether sustained engagement can help transform institutions once associated with repression into institutions capable of constraining power, protecting rights, and credibly adjudicating the crimes of the past. That is a project worth supporting.
