Syria war crimes lawyer resigns

A SENIOR war crimes prosecutor has resigned from a United Nations panel on Syria, saying she has lost faith that it can bring criminals to account and that “everyone is bad” in the country.

Carla Del Ponte said she was leaving the three-member commission investigating human rights abuses in Syria after five years because it did “absolutely nothing”. She said: “We have had no success. For five years we’ve been running against walls. We are powerless.”

Mrs Del Ponte sat on tribunals investigating atrocities in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, but decried the UN Security Council’s refusal to appoint a similar court for Syria. Russia repeatedly vetoes council actions. “I give up,” the 70-year-old Swiss said. “The states in the Security Council do not want justice. I can’t any longer be part of this commission.”

The commission was set up in August 2011 by the Human Rights Council to investigate crimes in Syria, whoever the perpetrator. It has published reports but investigators have never gained access to Syria itself, instead relying on interviews, photos, medical records and other documents.

The reports detail torture, rape, starvation sieges, mass bombing of civilians and use of chemical weapons. However, Mrs Del Ponte, who put Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic on trial at The Hague, said that as long as the Security Council did not put in place a special tribunal for war crimes in Syria, all such reports were pointless. She was the first UN official to blame the Assad regime for the sarin gas attacks in 2013, which killed more than 1,000. She said then that justice would eventually catch up with the president.

In her comments, made to the Swiss magazine Blick, Mrs Del Ponte described Syria as a land without a future. She said she had never seen such war crimes before, either in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia.

“We thought the international community had learned from Rwanda. But it learned nothing,” she said.

“The Assad government is committing terrible crimes against humanity and using chemical weapons. And the opposition is made up only of extremists and terrorists.”