Fionnuala Ní Aoláin on detention camps in North-East Syria

Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is a professor of law and founding member and associate director of the Transitional Justice Institute in Norther Ireland. She recently completed her mandate as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of humain rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism.

During her mandate, Professor Ní Aoláin gave particular attention to the human rights situation in North-East Syria. In 2023, she conducted an official visit to North-East Syria where she documented the conditions of thousands of men, women and children held in detention camps under counterterrorism measures. She highlighted the urgent need for repatriation, accountability, and gender-sensitive approaches to addressing the crisis.

The interview was conducted by Blandine Bonneville, Tiphaine Mittelmann, Morine Chauvris, Sofiane Toubal and Carol Turculet.

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The interview was conducted in the spring of 2025 and has been edited for clarity.

As today's conversation will focus on your 2023 mission to North-East Syria (NES), could you set the scene and explain why NES is such a legally and morally complex space ?

From late 2012 onwards, Syria descended into sectarian and civil violence, and we see the growth and metastasization of multiple non-state armed groups on the territory of Syria. We also see the emergence of what ultimately becomes a designated terrorist group, ISIL or Daesh, which controls large parts of Syria for a period and establishes a caliphate.

At the fall of that caliphate, the fall of Raqqa, in 2017, we see hundreds and thousands of people being displaced, but in particular we see a large group of people who were deemed to be associated with ISIL or other groups in northeast Syria who end up in detention camps run by another non-state armed group called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

That thumb sketch of northeast Syria is a place which is not held by the state. It is held by a non-state group which has aspirations to statehood, and you have multiple non-state armed groups.

The other piece that makes northeast Syria so complex is that you have other states holding Syrian territory. You have an occupation by Turkey. You have U.S. forces and U.S. bases on the territory of northeast Syria. You have a Russian presence because it provided ongoing assistance and support and you had Iranian presence on the territory.

That was the context in which my visit to northeast Syria took place.

Why did you prioritize visiting NES during your mandate? What did it take to gain access, and were there political or institutional pressures that influenced your ability to conduct your investigation?

It is very complex to build trust with a regime that has engaged in systematic human rights violations against its citizens. You are in a very complex political situation where you want to get access to the territory, which requires the consent of the territorial state, but you also need to maintain your integrity and your independence about what that state is doing to its own people. It is a very fine line to tread.

On top of that, it was not the Syrian government who was holding women and children. It was a non-state actor. So even had we got the consent - as we ultimately did - of the Syrian authorities to travel to northeast Syria and Damascus, we still had to get the non-state actor to engage with us.

We also had to get all four states who had a military presence on the territory of northeast Syria to agree, at least in principle, that they would do no harm to us should we come to northeast Syria.

This was a really, really complex and multilayered negotiation. The visit ultimately took place in the last couple of months of my mandate term.

Could you name a few gross human rights violations that were taking place in North East Syria? What was wrong with the detention of women and children and even men in the region?

It is complicated. At the fall of the caliphate, as large numbers of people were streaming out of Raqqa and other cities, many of them moved to places they believed to be places of safety in North East Syria, and one was Al-Hol, which was a large refugee camp. There was some infrastructure in this place to absorb a population that was moving.

To be clear, it was not entirely clear who's in that population. You have to also understand that you have large numbers of women and children, but you also have large numbers of men.

From the state's perspective, or other states, remember, at this point, we have several UN Security Council resolutions focused on Daesh. They have defined Daesh as being a threat to global peace and security. This is a designated terrorist organization that has committed heinous human rights violations, war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, rape, arbitrary detention.

You have got people fleeing, but there is a big question as to who is in this group of people who are fleeing. Certainly there are innocent civilians, to use that word. But also there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people whose status is unknown.

Once these large groups of people came under the control of the non-state actor, the SDF, our estimate was that there were 25 places of detention in northeast Syria. They included these two large camps, al-Hol and al-Raj, but also an infrastructure of prisons, from Panorama to Al-Aya. There were also detention facilities for young boys. It is a mixed detention kind of picture.

Our guess was, based on the information that we had available before we traveled, that there were multiple human rights violations. First of all, it was arbitrary detention. Because ultimately, all of those people who end up being detained never have legal process. No one ever decides what their legal status is. So recall the basic rule of international human rights law, which is that if you are going to deprive a person of their liberty, you have to have a legal basis to do so. We have no idea if any of these people have in fact committed any crimes or have any association with any groups.

In such an environment—where fear of retaliation from guards, states, or even one’s own community is real—how do you ensure integrity and protection when collecting testimonies?

Your capacity to protect anyone is extremely low. That is particularly true when you are meeting with a person who is in the custody of a non-state armed group. I believe that your attempts [and protecting them] are always going to be inadequate to the situation you face.

Then you have to make hard calls about whether you interview someone or you do not. When you start to interview them you have to tell them that there is a risk if they give you information and that information is clearly traceable to them.

There is absolutely nothing you can do to protect them. That is really complicated because a person who is in a camp, who has not seen a lawyer for five years, who has not had any contact with the outside world, may think that it is worth the risk to talk to you. But the truth is that they may not be in a position to give you informed consent. It is a really complicated situation.

The best you could do is say to the non-state actor that you are going to issue a report at the end of your admission, that you are going to go to the General Assembly and issue another report in about three months' time, and, if they is reprisal, if you hear about it, then you will report them. To be clear, that is not an adequate remedy and it does not protect the people that you meet.

What is the cost? Let's assume that there is a reprisal. Whose army is going to protect these people? There is this very huge ethical and moral dilemma about what it means to go into any place of confinement and take information from people.

Your report underscores that states have extraterritorial human rights obligations, particularly towards their detained nationals. Can you walk us through what those obligations are and how states responded to being reminded of them?

It is very complicated. We came back from Syria. We had met with large numbers of detainees from multiple countries. As soon as we got to Geneva, we made appointments to see every ambassador of every national that we had met. That was a large number of meetings.

What I can say is that many were shocked by what they heard, but ultimately the barrier to repatriation may not be the ambassador in Geneva who understands precisely what you are telling them when you explain what is happening to their nationals, you name the nationals, you talk about the children you have seen, the trauma that you have seen, and the violence that women and children and men are experiencing. It is a political decision.

We, the mandate, made an argument, for example, on jurisdiction. I have to say that it is a really good legal argument, but no state has accepted it. Neither has the European Court on Human Rights (ECHR) accepted the point that states whose nationals are in these camps and places of detention in northeast Syria can have constructive jurisdiction over their nationals because they can prevent their human rights violations by bringing them home. The Committee on the Rights of the Child has accepted that interpretation, but not the ECHR.

Where we have found success is where there has been domestic litigation, and those countries under their domestic law have been found to have an obligation to bring their nationals home, either as a matter of constitutional law or even as a matter of child protection law in several countries.

Can reports like yours serve as a form of accountability even when courts are absent? Can they shape legal precedents or reparative policies?

There are multiple ways the report serves a function. Even if you do not always see immediate responses by the government, I do think that these reports shape government policy. Government officials can go to other government officials and to political leaders and say that they are facing criticism. I think it works there.

I think the second thing it does is that facts change the way we talk about a situation. Because the visit was the first visit by a UN human rights expert to northeast Syria, you get access to places that others do not. We were able to report on facts in a way that were indisputable.

I suppose one of the things I take away is that no one contested the facts of the report. They may not have liked the legal arguments that followed the facts, but no one contested the numbers we provided, the information we described about the human rights violations, or even the scale and nature of those violations. I think that is really important because it just reshapes the way people talk about a problem and therefore you move solutions along.

I think that the other thing we see happening is that, since I came back from Syria, we have seen several litigation proceedings using the report as a basis for going to a judge. I have issued multiple affidavits in different proceedings attesting to what I saw and what it means for the case at hand.

I also think the report shaped UN practice. Part of the thing it did was it gave the UN itself more information for the agencies. Let's just say there are several humanitarian agencies on the ground in northeast Syria. Many of them were seeing what we were seeing, but their mandates prevented them from saying it publicly. You enable and you support other UN entities by naming something.

I think it works in multiple ways. This is one of the reasons why it matters to get your report right, which is that if it is correct, legally and factually correct, you just stick to what you see and what you know, the longevity of the report will stick.

The other places that we have seen it sticks is with journalists. I think we have seen a lot of journalists go to northeast Syria and, based on the report, ask questions they would not have known to ask otherwise.

You have said before that justice does not always start in courtrooms. In a place like NES, where formal justice mechanisms are non-existent, what alternative forms of justice should we be imagining?

It is interesting because one of the things we found in northeast Syria is there are justice mechanisms. The SDF runs people's courts, there are legal procedures, but my team and I found them to be really deficient as a matter of international law practice and standing. We did not find those courts to be adequate and felt that any conviction that had been sustained in those courts - mostly for terrorism - was unsafe and unsatisfactory. You are right though, there is no other mechanism.

We have two other problems. Syria is not a member of the International Criminal Court, and overall Syria is in a process of reconstruction where justice across the board has to be rebuilt. One thing I would start with is that, if Syria rebuilds justice, northeast Syria cannot be kind of carved out of that. It has to be part of the process.

One of the things that worries me is we have an agreement in principle between the SDF and the central new authorities of Syria, but the details of that agreement are not public, so we do not actually know what is in it, and in particular what is in it for the justice sector.

The first position would be no carve-outs. If we are going to rebuild justice across the entire Syrian Arab Republic, then northeast Syria has to be a part of that.

The second, of course, is the obligations of the international community, and there are two different kinds of obligations in play here. One is that the victims of Daesh are still missing justice. We have two big absences of justice. We have victims of the terrorist act of a designated terrorist group that committed egregious violations of human rights across the territory of Syria and Iraq. The second is that the SDF itself - in my view, with the support and acquiescence of states in the global coalition - have facilitated and perpetrated grievous violations of human rights under the guise of detention. It concerns me greatly that we are likely not to see accountability for those violations.

Could an international tribunal be a viable option for individuals currently held in NES? Under what conditions might that make legal and moral sense?

One of our big advantages in Syria, I will say it is a huge advantage that lots of other places do not have, is we have the IIIM mechanism. We have the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, unlike conflicts, think of Sudan or Ethiopia, where we could never muster up enough support from states to document what was happening as they were going along.

In this case, we have an enormous data reserve of information. I think that gives us a huge strategic advantage in the future to hold people accountable in ways that it is really hard to do in places where you just do not have that body of information available to you.