GERMANY POISED TO INDICT ASSAD REGIME OVER SARIN ATTACKS

The brutal sarin attack in Ghouta, Syria on August 21, 2013 killed 1,000 people, 400 of them children and another attack in rebel-held Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib in 2017 killed 70 women, children and innocent civilians.

These attacks shocked much of the world and nearly triggered military interventions from France, the UK and the US. When plans for Western operations against the Syrian regime collapsed, international efforts turned toward the International Criminal Court (ICC), Deutsche Welle (DW) and Der Spiegel reported.

However, Russia and China, veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council, blocked all attempts to refer the case to the ICC. Instead, they pressured Syria into joining the Chemical Weapons Convention, effectively forcing the regime to destroy its chemical weapons stockpile in the process. Documentation obtained by DW suggests that the Syrian regime did not comply with its obligations to dismantle its chemical weapons program in its entirety. The Syrian embassy in Berlin did not respond to a request for comment.

And yet, seven years on, the tides may be turning in their favor. Investigators at the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Germany said they are reviewing evidence of sarin attacks in Syria, In early October, a consortium of three non-government organizations filed a criminal complaint with the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Germany against unnamed persons with regards to apparent sarin gas attacks in Ghouta in 2013 and Khan Sheikhoun in 2017. The consortium's motivation was clear — and strategic. In 2002, Germany enacted the principle of universal jurisdiction for international crimes, such as war crimes and genocide. It effectively brought German domestic law into accordance with the Rome Statute, a treaty that established the ICC that year.

By doing so, Germany extended its jurisdiction over "the most serious crimes affecting the international community as a whole," even if they were not committed within its territory or against its citizens. In Koblenz, the first case accusing Syrian regime figures of systematic torture opened in April as a result of Germany's universal jurisdiction. That led the Open Society Justice Initiative, the Syrian Archive, and the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression to file the criminal complaint with the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe, where a war crimes unit had launched a structural probe in 2011 into atrocities committed in Syria.