On Wednesday, January 19, 2022, a Syrian doctor went on trial in Germany in the second such case over alleged state-backed torture in Syria.
The suspect, identified as Alaa M under German privacy laws, was charged with crimes against humanity, including torturing prisoners at military hospitals in Syria.
Alaa arrived in Germany in 2015 where he continued to practise medicine until his arrest in July 2020.
He has been charged with 18 counts of torture and one count of murder.
The trial at Frankfurt’s higher regional court is the second of its kind in Germany and adds to other European efforts to hold loyalists of President Bashar al-Assad’s government to account for alleged war-era atrocities.
Last Thursday, a German court has sentenced a Syrian former intelligence officer to life in prison in a case the UN rights chief said could lead to accountability for other perpetrators of the war’s “unspeakable crimes”.
Anwar Raslan, a former colonel loyal to the regime who later defected and gained asylum in Germany, was deemed by the judge at Koblenz higher regional court to have verifiably overseen the murder of at least 27 and torture of at least 4,000 prisoners at a detention facility in Damascus.
On February 24, 2021, as part of the same criminal trial, the Koblenz High Regional Court convicted Eyad Al-Gharib to a prison term of four and a half years for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, including torture and arbitrary deprivation of liberty.
The accused were tried thanks to the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows the prosecution of suspected perpetrators of serious crimes under international law, even when such crimes have not been committed in the country where the criminal proceedings take place and when neither victims nor the defendants are nationals of that country.
