We cannot speak about sustainable peace or about even justice if there is no clarification about the truth. This is part of justice. Justice is not only the verdict or the sanction. It is more about the satisfaction of the victims themselves.
Mazen Darwish is a Syrian human rights lawyer and human rights activist. He is the founder and President of the Syria Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM) and one of the Secretary Generals of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).
During the onset of the Syrian Civil War in early 2011, Mazen covered confrontations in Daraa and Mazen was arrested in March 2011 by intelligence units of the Syrian Air Force. While he was officially released in May 2012, he was in fact forcibly disappeared and his fate and whereabouts remained unknown until he was released from a state prison in 2015.
The Independent Institution on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic (IIMP) was established by a UN General Assembly Resolution adopted in June 2023. Since the start of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, no fewer than 130,000 individuals have been forcibly disappeared in Syria, with the real number likely being higher. This new institution will have two aims, firstly to clarify the fate and whereabouts of all missing persons in Syria, and secondly to provide adequate support for victims, survivors and families of those missing.
Interview by Carolina Bergstein, Sebastian Beyenburg, Anaël Daoud, Ginevra Falciani and Molly Leeson (2023).
The interview was conducted in the spring of 2024 and has been edited for clarity
Could you please explain more about the right to truth and what the creation of the IIMP means for victims?
Yes, thank you very much. We cannot speak about sustainable peace or about even justice if there is no clarification about the truth. This is part of justice. Justice is not only the verdict or the sanction. It is more about the satisfaction of the victims themselves. This is one of the most important things, the truth, what happened, where it happened. Especially for the missing person and their families, one of the most important things for them is to know the truth.
It is very important also that the creation of the IIMP shows that this is essential for families and for the future of the country. We can’t speak about a political solution if we don’t solve these humanitarian needs for the victims.
Do you think that the IIMP is sufficiently victim-centred to provide adequate support to victims and survivors?
It might be too early to have judgment about the IIMP. I think if we read the articles [in the General Assembly resolution] about the creation [of the IIMP], we can see that the victim is central to the approach and the structure. It might be the first time that we have a structural position inside one of the UN mechanisms for victims. But we are still at the very beginning.
There is a lot of work still needed to create this mechanism and for it to work. If we look at the articles, in the good willing, yes, I can recognize that a lot of our demands and language have been added. But we need to also see the practical steps taken to have a victim-centred approach and how this mechanism will fill the gap between the needs of the victims and the behaviour of the authorities, especially the Syrian government.
In your opinion, given that women are disproportionately affected by the consequences of being forcibly displaced and having missing relatives, to what extent does the IIMP responds to the needs of Syrian women?
The missing people crisis is everywhere, not only in Syria. Women might be the most affected because men are the majority of the missing people, which means that the family and the women left are the most affected.
It is amazing to see how the women led the road to creating this mechanism. Again, it’s maybe too early to say if the mechanism appropriately responds to women’s needs. Right now, there is no staff, there is no structure, there is no head, they haven’t started yet. And we don’t think that it is going to start before 2025.
The most important thing is that it is not about the structure, the articles and the good willing, but about how we can take this good and noble idea, structure it and make it have real results for those women and victims.
We now wanted to look with you a little bit more at the accountability implications of the new institutions - or the lack of accountability implications. Being the first ever initiative to be fully conceived and developed by Syrian survivors and family members of missing persons, it is not an overstatement to maintain that the new institution marks a significant moment for victims’ rights, both in the way it was created and in the goals that it seeks to accomplish. However, some human rights bodies and civil society organizations, including Syrian civil society organizations, have been critical of the institution for weakening its mandate for pragmatic reasons in order for the international community to accept the institution. When the resolution was adopted, it was explicitly described as international and independent, and the fact that it does not work on accountability. In your opinion, to what extent do you think the humanitarian and depoliticized nature of the institution should be considered a failure of accountability towards victims?
Thank you for raising this, because there was a huge dialogue when we were working on the creation of the institution with the civil society and the victims. For me, I don’t think that this is a failure, or that there is a real need to add the accountability component to this mechanism.
Justice and accountability are not one shot, or we will have one mechanism or one body, which will do everything. Yes, I’m one of those victims, and I would be happy if we could just push the button and solve everything and have justice and accountability. I think it is more complicated.
We need to look for justice and accountability and sustainable peace in the end, because justice is not revenge, and we need to see it as a puzzle. This mechanism is only one part of the whole picture. I don’t think that we can wait until we have a political transition and maybe then start to give answers to the families. There are thousands, dozens of thousands, more than maybe 100,000 missing persons, and I believe that the number is bigger than this. And there is a huge need for families to know, to move forward. There are legal and social needs also for women and families.
It is not only about the verdict in the court. This is necessary, for sure, but I do not think that we will reach everything with one body or one shot. There is a need to decentralize the problem and find solutions for each problem but in one strategy.
What we’ve just talked about in the podcast so far was very much focused on the IIMP, but we would like to put it more into the context of current developments. One such current development is the Majdi Nema universal jurisdiction case here in France. We were wondering how this case and the court’s verdict in that case factors into the lack of accountability that currently exists for the enforced disappearance in the international justice arena. And maybe you can talk a little bit about how you believe universal jurisdiction and the IIMP can work together.
Honestly, the lack of justice and the international justice failure is not only about enforced disappearance. It is for all crimes, and not only for Syria, unfortunately. I think it is very important to also have a look at how the victims themselves try to find solutions for this failure.
Using universal jurisdiction and extraterritorial jurisdiction might be one of the tools, but we need also to be clear that this is not the justice. This is not the first choice for the victim, or this is not the best practice to achieve sustainable peace in any country suffering from conflict or civil war like Syria. This is only an alternative choice. This is because we can’t have transitional justice in Syria because there is no political transition, and we can’t reach international justice.
There is another tool, the ICC, but we know how both China and Russia use their veto in this regard. So, universal jurisdiction is the alternative. It is the way to keep the file of justice and accountability on the table. To not allow the Syrian government or even the warlords from different parties and their supporters, the regional and the international powers, to go for a political agreement built in their interest, ignoring the rights of the victim, and have a political achievement like a ceasefire but not sustainable peace. Universal jurisdiction is one of the tools, but once again it is not justice.
It is very important to see that victims and civil society use all these tools, the UN mechanisms, the IIMP, the IIIM, and even a lot of mechanisms inside the Human Rights Council, to keep their needs on the table, to speak their voice as a victim without putting into consideration the interest.
It is also very important for us, for our future in Syria. Yes, there is a gap. We knew what happened in this, specifically, this part about the Majdi Nema case and how the French court refused to add the crime of enforced disappearance. This is also one example of how the situation has changed. When the treaty [the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance] started, I can understand that they framed it as [a crime that is only committed by] the governments and maybe groups linked to the government. But if we look at the situation in the MENA, in the whole world, in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Yemen, and even in Palestine, everywhere, non-state armed groups are also committing the crime of enforced disappearance.
We see that it is the de facto power that now makes the rules. When it comes to this crime, we need to make a development in the treaty. The treaty should not only be concerned with governments and their state agents. From our experience only in SCM, we have been suffering from this crime, the enforced disappearance, some of us from the government, and some from also Jaysh al-Islam and military rebels.
It is also very important if we look at the last ten years and the development in international law regarding what happened in Syria, not only on the legal side but also changes in the UN mechanisms. If we are looking at the IIIM, the IIMP, and many of other things happening, these did not exist before what happened in Syria. There is a new model, there is a new wave of international mechanisms, and we need to be happy, but we need to monitor this development and see how we can use it in other crises.
The situation in Myanmar, for example, shows how the IIIM is not only needed in Syria, and I think it is also the case with the IIMP. In the future, we will find that this model is needed everywhere. Using universal jurisdiction, many of these tools created by victims, and this movement for justice, it’s very important.
To finish on a high note, I think we would like to ask you, returning a little bit to the IIMP, whether your outlook on the IIMP’s work is positive, and whether you believe that it can fill some of the impunity gaps that we now still see when it comes to international justice in Syria ?
Yes, I am very positive about the creation of the IIMP. I started working on this in 2016 when we sent the first non-paper to the UN in this regard. So yes, I am very positive to finally see this start happening, after all of these years. But again, we are in the first step, and it will take, unfortunately, maybe two or three decades to solve this issue, if we can solve one hundred percent of these cases of missing and forcibly disappeared persons.
It is very complicated in Syria that, as you said, in the majority of the cases, the responsibility stems from the government, but we also have ISIS, we have the opposition rebels, etc. There are many layers of this problem. Maybe the most important for me is not the mechanism itself, but the efforts done by the victims. This is what makes me also positive, and feel that in the end, whatever it will take, as long as the victims themselves are fighting for justice and accountability for truth, we will reach it.
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