UN helping 12 jurisdictions with Syria war crimes cases

A team in Geneva is building a repository of evidence and information that constitute 'the best documented situation since the end of the Second World War'

Syrian soldiers are seen cheering President Bashar Al Assad during his visit to Al Habit on the southern edges of the Idlib province, in a picture released on October 22, 2019. AFP / Syrian Presidency Facebook page

A Turkish gendarme retrieves the body of Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi from a beach in Turkey. Reuters

The guided-missile destroyer 'USS Porter' conducts strikes while in the Mediterranean Sea, on April 7, 2017. AFP / US NAVY

A handout picture released by the official Syrian Arab News Agency on October 31, 2013, shows the remains of a mortar after an alleged mortar attack by rebel fighters on the Damascus mixed Christian-Druze suburb of Jaramana. AFP / Sana

Displaced Syrians from the south of Idlib province sit out in the open in the countryside west of the town of Dana in the north-west Syrian region on December 23, 2019. AFP

This picture shows a general view of an overcrowded displacement camp near the village of Qah near the Turkish border in Syria's north-west Idlib province, on October 28, 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic crisis. AFP

A picture taken on March 23, 2019, shows the last ISIS bastion in the eastern Syrian village of Baghuz after the defeat of the group. The Kurdish-led forces pronounced the end of ISIS regime on March 23, 2019, after flushing out the diehard militants from their very last bastion in eastern Syria. AFP

Anti-government activists gesture as they gather on the streets of Daraa, 100 kilometres south of the capital Damascus, on March 23, 2011. AFP

Syria's President Bashar Al Assad heading a cabinet meeting in the presidential palace in Damascus in 2013. Sana / AFP

A picture taken on October 3, 2015 shows a Russian army pilot leaving the cockpit of a Russian Sukhoi Su-25 ground attack aircraft at the Hmeimim airbase in the Syrian province of Latakia. AFP

Members of the Free Syrian Army raise their weapons during a patrol in Idlib in north-west Syria on February 18, 2012. AFP

Syrian President Bashar Al Assad is shown shaking hands with government troops in Eastern Ghouta, in the leader's first trip to the former rebel enclave outside Damascus in years, in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on March 18, 2018. Syrian Presidency Facebook page / AFP

Militant fighters wave flags as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa province, on June 30, 2014. Reuters

A United Nations body working to ensure justice for war crimes committed by all sides in Syria has provided information and evidence to 12 national jurisdictions, its chief disclosed on Monday as the country marked a decade of war.

Videos, photos, satellite imagery, "exfiltrated documents", witness statements and forensic samples constitute "the best-documented situation since the end of the Second World War", said Catherine Marchi-Uhel of the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism investigating the most serious crimes in Syria.

"It doesn't make the justice path easy, but it makes it possible," Ms Marchi-Uhel, a former French judge, told a panel event hosted by Britain.

Her small team in Geneva is building a repository of the large amount of evidence and information and corroborated it in accordance with international criminal law standards, she said.

"We are co-operating with and assisting investigations and prosecutions in 12 different jurisdictions," Ms Marchi-Uhel said.

We have received 100 requests for assistance in relation to 84 distinct investigations and prosecutions."

It had shared information and evidence for 39 of the 100 investigations.

Ms Marchi-Uhel, referring to the 12 jurisdictions, later told Reuters: "A large proportion are in Europe".

A court in the German city of Koblenz last month sentenced a former member of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad's security services to four and a half years in prison for abetting the torture of civilians, the first such verdict for crimes against humanity in the Syrian civil war.

Paulo Pinheiro, who heads a separate panel of UN war crimes investigators that keeps a confidential list of suspects, told the Monday's event: "To date, the Commission of Inquiry has compiled initial information on more than 3,200 alleged individual perpetrators.

"That includes individuals from all sides of the conflict, including government and pro-government forces, anti-government armed groups, and United Nations-listed terrorist organisations, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and ISIS," he said.