Court to decide whether former dictator Assad can be stripped of immunity

Syria’s former president Bashar al-Assad could be stripped of his diplomatic immunity (Remy de la Mauviniere/AP)

France’s highest court is ruling on Friday on whether it can strip the head of state immunity of Bashar Assad, the former leader of Syria now in exile in Russia, because of the brutality of the evidence in accusations against him collected by Syrian activists and European prosecutors.

If the judges at the Cour de Cassation lift Assad’s immunity, it could pave the way for his trial in absentia over the use of chemical weapons in Ghouta in 2013 and Douma in 2018, and set a precedent to allow the prosecution of other government leaders linked to atrocities, human rights activists and lawyers say.

Assad has retained no lawyers for these charges and has denied he was behind the chemical attacks.

A ruling against Assad would be “a huge victory for the victims”, said Mazen Darwish, president of the Syrian Centre for Media which collected evidence of war crimes.

500,000 The number of people believed to have died in Syria's 13-year civil war

“It’s not only about Syrians, this will open the door for the victims from any country and this will be the first time that a domestic investigative judge has the right to issue an arrest warrant for a president during his rule.”

He said the ruling could enable his group to legally go after regime members, like launching a money laundering case against former Syrian central bank governor and minister of economy, Adib Mayaleh, whose lawyers have argued he had immunity under international law.

For over 50 years, Syria was ruled by Hafez Assad and then his son, Bashar. During the Arab Spring, rebellion broke out against their tyrannical rule in 2011 across the country of 23 million, igniting a brutal 13-year civil war that killed more than half a million people, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights.

Millions more fled to Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Europe.

The Assad dynasty manipulated sectarian tensions to stay in power, a legacy driving renewed violence in Syria against minority groups despite promises that the country’s new leaders will carve out a political future for Syria that includes and represents all its communities.

The ruling stripping Assad’s immunity could set a “significant precedent” that “could really set the stage for potentially for other cases in national jurisdictions that strike down immunities,” said Mariana Pena, a human rights lawyer at the Open Society Justice Initiative, which helped bring the case to court.

As the International Criminal Court has issued arrests warrants for leaders accused of atrocities — like Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines — the French judges’ ruling could empower the legal framework to prosecute not just deposed and exiled leaders but those currently in power.

The Syrian government denied in 2013 that it was behind the Ghouta attack, an accusation the opposition rejected as Assad’s forces were the only side in the brutal civil war to possess sarin.

The United States subsequently threatened military retaliation, but Washington settled for a deal with Moscow for Assad to give up his chemical weapons’ stockpile.