Criminal inquiries loom over chemical weapons
PARIS — Chemical munitions experts have for years compiled information that Syria’s government has used these banned weapons against its own people, a war crime that so far has gone unpunished and been dismissed with a sneer by President Bashar Assad.
Now the first criminal inquiries that target Assad and his associates over the use of chemical weapons may soon get under way.
In a major step to hold Assad and his circle accountable for some of the worst atrocities committed in the decadeold Syria conflict, judges at a special war crimes unit in France’s palace of justice have received a complaint about chemical weapons attacks in Syria, filed by three international human rights groups.
The complaint, which lawyers said the judges likely would accept, requests a criminal investigation of Assad, his brother, Maher, and a litany of senior advisers and military officials that formed the chain of command.
Together with a similar complaint filed in Germany in October, the French complaint, submitted Monday and made public Tuesday, opens a new front aimed at ensuring that some form of justice for chemical weapons crimes is exacted on Assad and his hierarchy.
If nothing else, the criminal inquiries in France and Germany could vastly complicate the future for Assad, who has emerged largely victorious in the Syrian war, but with a pariah status that has blocked the international aid necessary to rebuild his country.
Getting such aid could become even more difficult if Assad and his upper echelons are defendants in prosecutions for war crimes in European courts, even if they consider such proceedings illegitimate. Nor are millions of Syrians who fled to Europe and elsewhere as refugees likely to return home.
Steve Kostas, senior lawyer of the group that filed the complaints in France, said it focused on the August 2013 events in the city of Douma and the region of Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus — coordinated attacks of sarin nerve agent or chlorine fumes from bombs that the U.S. government said killed more than 1,400 people, making them the world’s deadliest use of chemical weapons in this century.
More than 300 chemical weapons attacks in Syria have been documented by experts.