UN investigators, who have been collecting evidence of the Syrian regime's crimes for years, say the fall of Assad offers a seminal opportunity to gather first-hand evidence. FRANCE 24's Charlotte Hughes reports. Sharon Gaffney speaks to Janine Di Giovanni, executive director of The Reckoning Project. She says that the atrocities committed by the Assad regime have been documented extensively since the start of the war in 2011 and that there is plenty of evidence against the perpetrators.
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00:00This is Apropos. The UN Special Envoy to Syria is calling for free and fair elections following
00:08the ousting of President Bashar al-Assad, adding that the international community was
00:12ready to support the country's new leaders. He also voiced hope that a political solution
00:17would be found for Kurdish-held areas. Years of civil war have left Syria heavily dependent
00:23on aid, deeply fragmented and desperate for justice and peace. Charlotte Hughes has the
00:30latest.
00:31At the notorious Sednaya prison, north of Damascus, Syrians leaf through abandoned records.
00:37They're desperately seeking news of missing loved ones detained under the Assad regime.
00:43Among those calling for truth and justice after witnessing years of human rights violations
00:48is Hassan. His brother was imprisoned in 2019.
00:53I went to Mazar airbase yesterday. I went through the records and couldn't find anything.
00:59I looked in the hospitals and I didn't find anything. I came here to find a string of
01:03hope but I found nothing.
01:06UN investigators have been gathering proof of the regime's crimes for years. After thousands
01:11of photos of tortured detainees surfaced, the UN established the International, Impartial
01:16and Independent Mechanism in 2016. It centralises and shares evidence for use in legal proceedings.
01:24In the words of the organisation's leader, Bashar al-Assad's ouster changes the game
01:28in terms of access to evidence.
01:31There is, however, the potential in this now accessible crime scene, or maybe I should
01:38say interlocking series of crime scenes, there is now the possibility of accessing evidence
01:44of the highest level of regime and allied crimes responsibility.
01:51Preserving this information is not a straightforward task.
01:55We've had reports and we've seen as well, papers strewn all over the floor, people leaving
02:01with computers, hard drives burnt and smashed. We are also aware of reports, some of which
02:09we have confirmed, of individuals who have fled the jurisdiction.
02:13The UN is now calling on Syria's new leaders to not disturb the evidence of crimes by seizing
02:18prisons.
02:19HTS leader, Ahmed al-Shara, who has dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani,
02:25has insisted that torturers will not be granted amnesty.
02:28We're joined now by war crimes investigator Janine DiGiovanni, award-winning writer and
02:35executive director of the Reckoning Project. It's an organisation dedicated to documenting
02:40war crimes and building cases for prosecution. Janine, thank you so much for being with us
02:46on the programme this evening. You have extensive experience in this area. You've investigated
02:52and documented a total of nearly two dozen wars and genocides, investigated abuses on
02:58four different continents and you've spent seven years in Syria. Talk to us about what
03:03you found there.
03:04Well, I think it's a really interesting time right now for international justice. If we
03:09look back at the genocides of the 1990s of Rwanda and Bosnia and where we are now, we're
03:15in a very different place. First of all, the investigations are carried out in a very different
03:20way, largely because we do have things like open source intelligence, which is satellite
03:25imagery, radio interception. So investigations can be much more clear. Now, Syria is, it's,
03:35it was one of the most tragic wars I've covered because the, the level of cruelty of the Assad's
03:42prisons, of the torture, of the cracking down, the repression, the rape, the starvation
03:49used as a tool of war, chemical attacks on his own people, the list is endless. So going
03:55through those crimes and bringing those perpetrators to justice, including Assad, is going to be
04:01a real task. But what is possible is that first of all, we have plenty, plenty of evidence.
04:10Syria was one of the most documented wars, largely because people, civilians had cell
04:17phones, they had iPhones. So in Aleppo, when the barrel bombs were dropping, people could
04:22rush out and take photographs of them. There were a lot of international journalists working
04:28there at the time. Amnesty was there, Human Rights Watch were there, Syrian investigators
04:33themselves were doing incredible jobs, even during the Assad regime. But what we have
04:40now is something similar to what happened in Germany in 1945, or, or Iraq, 2003. I wasn't
04:48born in 1945, but I was in Iraq in 2003, when Saddam fell. And what we had then was this
04:57extraordinary level of evidence of mass graves of going into prisons. But in Syria, we were
05:04doing it all along, even during the Assad regime, and from the other side, from the
05:09opposition side. I also think it's really important for Ahmad al-Sharaa to establish
05:17himself as a leader who believes in the rule of law. And he will need very much to attract
05:24international donors. So this is why I mean, everyone is saying, will he go the way of
05:29ISIS? Will he become a jihadist? I believe no, because I believe he, he's first distanced
05:37himself a dozen years ago from that. But also, he will need to get donors to rebuild Syria.
05:45In order to do that, there must be a strong rule of law within the country. Syrian courts
05:53have been basically under the Baathists for 50 years. They will need help. But there's
05:59many examples of what we could do.
06:02And what about Bashar al-Assad himself? Will he ever face justice? As far as we know, he's
06:06currently in Moscow.
06:08Yes. Look, I went through the Bosnian wars, and everyone said Slobodan Milosevic would
06:14never ever face justice. But what happened? Milosevic, Milosevic's government fell. A
06:22new government came in. They wanted to be part of the EU. And to do that, they made a
06:27deal to hand him over to the Hague. So in the same way, I work in Ukraine now with the
06:33Reckoning Project. We're a team of lawyers, investigators, OSINT data analysts. And
06:41everyone says we'll never get Putin. But we do not know that. There could be a change of
06:46regime. There could be an entirely new government who have completely different views and
06:52want to see Putin in the Hague. In the same way with Assad, anything can happen.
06:58Also, we have to look at the different international justice mechanisms. So what might
07:04happen in Syria, there might be something like what happened in Sierra Leone, which was a
07:09brutal war in West Africa that I also reported back in, it fell in 2000. The court that was
07:18set up at the request of the government of Sierra Leone, because it was a new government that
07:23came in, and the backed by the United Nations, went on for 10 years, going after the
07:29perpetrators that had committed terrible, terrible crimes against the Sierra Leonean
07:34people. Same thing with Cambodia. So there could be a mixture of domestic Syrian courts,
07:40because the Syrian justice system, it has to go to the Syrian people. It should be in Syria, it
07:47should be with the Syrian people. But it needs help, whether that will be the UN, hybrid
07:53courts, or whether even it will be an international court, the International Criminal
07:58Court. But in that case, the new government in Syria would have to call, call for it, because at
08:04the moment, they're not signed up. So there's many, many different avenues. And don't forget
08:11that back in 2022, the very first Syrian war crimes tribunal took place in Germany, against
08:21a man for crimes against humanity, a Syrian individual. And it took place in Germany in a
08:27third party country. So there are, you know, we're looking at this, in a way, overwhelmingly,
08:34because the number, the amount of criminality, 400,000 people died, 200,000 more were in
08:42prisons, 130,000 are still missing. 4000 of the people in prison were kids. So there's a
08:51tremendous amount of work we have to do.
08:55And when it comes to speaking to some of those people who were in those prisons, how do you
08:59record that kind of testimony in such a way that it will be admissible in court? Yes, there
09:04is to be a further trial.
09:05So one of the reasons we founded the Reckoning Project was that when I was a war reporter, I
09:11had witnessed many atrocities. And I had very good notes, but a journalist notes are not the
09:18same as testimonies that prosecutors need to build their cases. There need to be different
09:25standards used. For instance, if you're interviewing victims of sexual violence, you need
09:31to have a very strict protocol, including usually someone, a psychologist or a member of law
09:37enforcement with you. Interviewing children is extremely precarious, you need to be very
09:44careful. We just finished a year-long project actually in Ukraine, tracing the 19,000
09:53Ukrainian children that have been stolen and taken to Russia for forcible adoption. Now,
09:59working on those kind of testimonies is a very different way than how I would have worked as a
10:04journalist years ago. So, I mean, it has to be airtight so that the prosecutors will not throw
10:13them out of court. But having said that, in Syria, there's been a tremendous amount of civil
10:19society that have worked throughout the war, who have been so courageous, including the Caesar
10:25photographs, which came out from an Assad prison official who smuggled some of the most terrible
10:34images I've ever seen of what was happening inside the prison. So we have a lot of evidence to
10:41work with. It's just how will the system be put back together? And as for Assad, again, nothing
10:50is impossible. And he will be judged. He's certainly being judged now in the court of public
10:55opinion, which is very important. And hopefully he will be judged in the courts of law.
11:01And you yourself, you're going back to Syria in the new year.
11:04I am. I was, I don't want to say fortunate, but I, I did work on the Assad side for several long trips,
11:14which was very rare. In those days, no journalists were given visas. The only ones who got them were
11:19journalists who were either Russian or who were clearly on the side of the regime. I was obviously
11:24not. But they did let me in for several trips where I gathered a huge amount of information that I was
11:31thrown out after witnessing a massacre in Darayya, writing about it. And I was told never to come back,
11:39threatened, told I would be put in prison. So then I began going through the other side, which was through
11:45Turkey to Syria, working with the opposition groups, mainly in Aleppo. And one of the things I worked
11:51very strongly and closely on was the bombing of hospitals. This is something that the Russians who
11:58came into the game in Syria in 2015, it was their, their terrible specialty. And it's something that
12:05Vladimir Putin is doing again in Ukraine. It's part of what we call Putin's gruesome playbook. And Syria,
12:14at one point, there were so few hospitals left. There was only, I remember being in one triage. And there
12:22were kids dying of things that they could have been saved from, respiratory illnesses. But because
12:28there was no medical supplies, and because the doctors had mainly been killed, the cruelty of it was just
12:36staggering. Syria, during the Assad reign, was one of the most brutal and cruel and vicious places. So it's
12:45really exhilarating. But also we're looking at it with great euphoria, but also trepidation. Because we want
12:54to go right. We want justice to be served for the Syrian people who endured, endured so much.
13:01Janine, unfortunately, we'll have to leave it there for now. We could speak to you for hours, I feel. Thank you
13:05so much for being with us this evening. It's war crimes investigator Janine DiGiovanni, hopefully I'm
13:12pronouncing your name correctly there. She's also executive director of the Reckoning Project. Well,
13:16that is it from us for now.