From atrocity to accountability, Syria’s path runs through Geneva

Enforced disappearances were a hallmark of the Assad regime in Syria. What are the prospects for justice and can UN institutions in Geneva help?

For more than a decade, Radwan Abdellatif lived without confirmation of his brother’s fate. Samer Abdellatif was last seen alive in 2012, when popular protests challenging the tyrannical grip of the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad were in full swing in Syria.  

Samer had been seen by a fellow inmate in Sednayah, a prison complex just north of Damascus long synonymous with torture, death and disappearance. 

“The file of the missing detainees is forgotten,” Abdellatif says, packing his suitcase in Japan for yet another trip to Syria as his children play nearby. 

As Syrians mark the 15th anniversary of the 2011 uprising, questions of justice have shifted from protest slogans to tentative state policy. The new leadership in Damascus, which emerged from insurgent movements, inherited damaged courts and faces the daunting task of rebuilding distrusted security forces. Efforts in Geneva, a hub for multiple UN entities concerned with Syria, focus on how international support can assist a process for which the new authorities lack the capacity to carry out alone. 

Enforced disappearances were a hallmark of the Assad regime, which began with Hafez al-Assad in 1970 and continued with his son, Bashar. Over five decades, tens of thousands vanished into intelligence branches and prisons, leaving families in permanent uncertainty.

When protests erupted in 2011, demands for dignity and reform went hand in hand with calls to reveal the fate of the missing and to free political detainees. The regime’s refusal to do so, along with its escalation of arrests and violence, sparked collective revolt and pushed the country into civil war.

Searching for a missing brother in Syria

Abdellatif has travelled three times from Japan, his home for over a decade, to Syria in search of his brother since Assad unexpectedly suffered military defeat and fled to Russia in December 2024. On the first visit, the same month the dictator fell, he was among thousands of people combing through the underground cells and torture chambers of Sednayah hoping to find a trace of his brother. The half-burnt, crumpled prison logs he found revealed nothing – no proof of entry or exit, no death certificate. 

In his heart, Abdellatif knows his search for truth will end in the confirmation of death. Samer was forcibly disappeared on May 5, 2012 in Palmyra, a city of archaeological global fame in the central region of Homs. Some 20 armed members of the security forces raided the family home during prayer time, following an informant report that he had participated in anti-government demonstrations in the marginalised city. 

The former Sednayah detainee from Damascus who contacted Abdellatif in late 2012 confirmed that 32-year-old Samer was alive then. They met for coffee. He said that Samer had also passed through the notorious Palestine Branch, a multistorey building in Damascus with prison cells in the basement. No official confirmation of his whereabouts was ever provided by Syrian authorities.

Abdellatif went twice to Sednayah, first in late December 2024 and again in June 2025. He was dismayed to find no records from the relevant years. The few surviving registers that he did spot dated from 2016 onward. According to Abdellatif, demonstrators detained for participating in protests in Palmyra generally did not survive. The city was broadly classified as hostile and a terrorism hub after small-scale clashes with security forces.

“It was like entering a tomb, a terrifying place,” he says reflecting on the visit to the prison, the doors of which were broken open when insurgents led by now President Ahmed al-Sharaa marched to Damascus. “We always heard of this place. We know it is a place of death. The person headed for death comes here. The smell. The lack of light. The humidity. People died here.”

The former Sednayah detainee from Damascus who contacted Abdellatif in late 2012 confirmed that 32-year-old Samer was alive then. They met for coffee. He said that Samer had also passed through the notorious Palestine Branch, a multistorey building in Damascus with prison cells in the basement. No official confirmation of his whereabouts was ever provided by Syrian authorities. 

Abdellatif went twice to Sednayah, first in late December 2024 and again in June 2025. He was dismayed to find no records from the relevant years. The few surviving registers that he did spot dated from 2016 onward. According to Abdellatif, demonstrators detained for participating in protests in Palmyra generally did not survive. The city was broadly classified as hostile and a terrorism hub after small-scale clashes with security forces. 

“It was like entering a tomb, a terrifying place,” he says reflecting on the visit to the prison, the doors of which were broken open when insurgents led by now President Ahmed al-Sharaa marched to Damascus. “We always heard of this place. We know it is a place of death. The person headed for death comes here. The smell. The lack of light. The humidity. People died here.” 

Documenting atrocities, building evidence

Abdellatif’s search is one thread in a far larger effort to document and prosecute the crimes of the Assad era – among the most extensively documented of any contemporary conflict. Since 2011, Syrians with the support of international investigators and journalists have documented the relentless brutality of the regime and that of armed groups who shaped the war to oust it. 

There is no shortage of evidence even though much of the work was done at great risk. Geneva-based UN bodies, international human rights and media organisations, forensic investigators and others have amassed vast archives of testimony, photographs, detention records and satellite images detailing arbitrary arrests, sadistic forms of torture, enforced disappearances and mass death. 

That evidence became the backbone of landmark cases in European courts under universal jurisdiction. This has been the case in Germany, which has a large Syrian population and where top officials have been convicted, and France. The Geneva-based International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) assists such judicial processes. In over eight years of work, it has accumulated nearly 300 terabytes of data that prosecutors can use to build cases against perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the equivalent of roughly 62 million high resolution photos or 75,000 HD movies, which would take two centuries to watch.  

Syrians themselves “have been some of the most active, committed, politically savvy, competent advocates for themselves, for accountability, and some of the best documenters of atrocity crimes that the world has seen”, notes Robert Petit, who heads the IIIM, in an interview with Swissinfo in Geneva.   

“A lot of our work has depended on their agreeing to share the evidence they themselves gathered, often at grave personal risk, about these crimes,” says Petit.   

The toll of the violence in Syria was so high and access so limited that the UN ultimately stopped counting. Conservative estimates suggest that over 500,000 Syrians were killed and another 150,000 Syrians forcibly disappeared between 2011 and 2024. The discovery of dozens of mass graves since the ousting of Assad refreshed hopes for answers to what happened to those presumed tortured and killed. 

Syrian and international paths to accountability

Syria’s new authorities say they are keen to deliver justice, accountability and a sense of national reconciliation. They have established several national institutions with that goal in mind. Since Sharaa came to power, the dangers of inaction have surfaced in extrajudicial, identity-based killings and sporadic revenge-driven violence. Critics worry that Damascus is not fully using available expertise, is narrowly focused on former regime abuses, and excludes civil society from a process that would benefit from greater transparency.  

“The active participation of local communities in the design, implementation, and monitoring of justice mechanisms is a prerequisite for the success of any transitional justice process,” stressed Fadel Abdulghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, in an op-edExternal link. He notes that this participation often requires negotiating and adapting international human rights standards to fit local realities. 

The broader path to accountability is in part anchored in Geneva. The Swiss city hosts the UN Human Rights Council as well as the main international mechanisms tasked with documenting crimes committed in Syria. In addition to IIIM, it is home to the Syria-focused Independent International Commission of Inquiry and the Independent Institution on Missing Persons (IIMP). 

These bodies form the institutional backbone of efforts to transform documentation into legal accountability and responses for the families of the missing. Records are harrowing. The most famous are the Caesar filesExternal link – tens of thousands of photographs smuggled out of Syria by a military photographer – showing emaciated, mutilated bodies bearing clear signs of torture in detention facilities and military hospitals. The more recent Damascus DossierExternal link maps chains of command. The ousting of Assad created a rare opportunity to access state documents and atrocity crime scenes. 

It is also forcing Syrians to confront traumas spanning generations and cutting across social, political, and sectarian divides. The Assad regime’s victims include descendants of Muslim Brotherhood members who survived the Hama massacre in 1982, when Syrian government forces under Hafez al-Assad violently crushed an Islamist uprising; Alawite communist intellectuals and Kurdish activists; and Sunni peaceful activists and rebels whose demands for freedom and dignity were later reframed through the language of jihad. 

To tackle these deep and intergenerational wounds, Syria can draw on the work of the IIMP, which was established by the UN General Assembly with a humanitarian, truth-seeking mandate. “Our role is to clarify the fate and whereabouts of all missing persons in Syria, regardless of their affiliation, nationality, or the circumstances of their disappearance, and to support their families,” IIMP head Karla Quintana says. The work spans cases from before and after 2024, including enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, abduction, and migration-related disappearances. 

Across Syria’s political, ethnic, and geographic divides, Quintana has observed one unifying thread. “Families share a universal demand for truth and the right to know the fate of their loved ones,” she says. “Every family touched by this tragedy sees truth as essential for healing and rebuilding peace.” 

Before the fall of the Assad government, her team had no access to Syria. Its work was limited to advocacy and preparation. Since then, Quintana has overseen rotational deployments to Damascus, direct engagement with Syrian authorities and civil society, and the opening of multiple investigative lines while navigating funding cuts to the UN. 

The work is complex. Newly active lines of inquiry include cases of hundreds of children who were separated from their families and placed in so-called “security placements”, or orphanage facilities during the 2013-2018 phase of the civil war. Longer running are the unresolved cases involving Yazidi women abducted by the Islamic State group, which controlled large swathes of Syria and Iraq.  

There are many actors – old and new – working in the accountability space. Three national bodies were established in Syria in 2025 to address abuses. The National Commission for Transitional Justice has a mandate to investigate grave crimes committed specifically by the former Assad government. The National Commission for the Missing focuses on clarifying the fate of missing and forcibly disappeared persons from all parties. 

In March 2025, a wave of violence on Syria’s coast disproportionately targeted Alawite communities. This was in part driven by their perceived association with the former Assad government, in which Alawites were heavily represented within security and state institutions. In response, President Al-Sharaa established the Independent National Committee for Investigation and Fact-Finding on the Coastal Incidents.

Truth, justice and the long road ahead

Truth and reconciliation are recognised by Syrian and international actors as essential ingredients for building a stable and secure Syria. Within Syria, the will to pursue this may exist, but serious steps toward transitional justice have been stalled by the absence of a new constitution. The existing regime-era constitution does not provide the legal framework required to prosecute former officials for war crimes or crimes against humanity. 

“There is no notion of command responsibility in Syrian criminal law,” notes Petit of the IIIM. His office is still navigating the process of establishing a formal presence in Syria but is pleased to have been able to engage with the highest-level officials since the start. Dialogues centre on what is the best formula for justice and accountability in the Syrian context. 

“When you’re talking about half a million dead and more than 150,000 disappeared, what does justice even mean?” he asks. “There is very much an emphasis on a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned process [from Damascus officials], which the international community supports and is committed to. I’ve always perceived our position as one of assistance and support in implementation.”  

He argues that transitional justice demands painful, context-specific choices rather than moral absolutes. The government must weigh options such as amnesty or immunity and be transparent about why those decisions are made, even when such choices could anger victims. In situations of mass atrocity, full justice is often unattainable as many families will never learn the fate of their loved ones.

While reconciliation may seem more politically feasible than accountability, Petit stresses that it cannot substitute for justice. Part of the challenge is that the judiciary and security sectors need complete transformation, while Syria is also trying to reboot the economy in a context of shattered institutions and infrastructure while politically trying to reset its place in the world. 

“It’s a slow process,” he admits. “The breadth of the challenges are immense. And of course, as always in these cases, you have expectations for accountability and justice that are just completely off the charts.”   

This year has yielded some progress. In January, the IIIM held a roundtable in Geneva with Syrian justice officials and international prosecutors to discuss extraterritorial prosecutions and coordination between domestic and international efforts. In February, the IIIM conducted its first on-site evidence collection inside Syria at the Al-Khatib detention facility, documenting traces of torture and inhumane conditions with Syrian government cooperation.  

Abdellatif still craves clarity, but his expectations are low. There is, he believes, nothing left to be done for Samer. A data leak shared on WhatsApp, ostensibly reflecting official data, says a death certificate was issued for his brother on October 20, 2013, but only entered into registries five years later. The family got no notice. 

Now working to create a hotel amid war-destroyed infrastructure in his native Palmyra, he is certain of one thing. “There has to be trials for the criminals,” he says. “If we are clear that this person killed my brother, of course, I want him to be put on trial.”

With data analysis by Pauline Turuban and photo by Helen James

Edited by Virginie Mangin/ds