San Francisco Frontiers - To achieve peace, Syria must punish all crimes: rights lawyer

"We believe that the Syrians who paid the heavy cost to reach this moment will not accept changing one dictatorship into another," Mazen Darwish said in an interview.

Darwish, who was in Stockholm with his wife Yara Bader to receive an award for their work running the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), is one of the most high-profile rights advocates for Syria.

While acknowledging that progress "will take time", Darwish said: "We don't think that we will be able to reach sustainable peace in Syria if we don't solve all of these crimes."

Syria's international ties have started to reboot under its new transitional rulers, an Islamist coalition led by Ahmed al-Sharaa who commanded a rebel offensive which in December ended five decades of rule by the Assad family.

But Western powers in particular have urged the new leadership to respect freedoms and protect minorities -- and wariness lingers over the future directions the coalition might take.

President Donald Trump this week announced the lifting of US sanctions on Syria, which the Syrian foreign ministry hailed as a "pivotal turning point".

But Darwish, who was born in Nablus in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, said there are "a lot of challenges, a lot of worries regarding the new authorities".

Sharaa's administration has vowed to prosecute those responsible for the torture of tens of thousands of detainees held in Syrian prisons under toppled leader Bashar al-Assad, and under his father Hafez al-Assad.

Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia, is also accused of using chemical weapons against Syria's population.

"We hope we will have transitional justice roadmap in Syria," Darwish said.

He stressed that the new legal system should examine crimes from all parties and groups in the country.

But the goal of bringing in transitional justice to Syria has had a setback.

In late February, Syrian rights groups denounced the banning of a conference on transitional justice in the country to be attended by international NGOs and representatives of foreign governments.

That conference, aiming to establish rule of law with an eye to national reconciliation, was to examine the fate of those who disappeared and violations committed during the civil war.

- French case -

With Syria's own justice system still deficient and lacking trust, the SCM has turned to outside countries that have adopted universal jurisdiction over war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, among them France, Germany, Canada and the United States.

On Thursday, Darwish was due to testify in Paris as a civil party in a trial of former Syrian rebel, Majdi Nema, accused of complicity in war crimes in Syria.

The former member of Jaysh al-Islam, whose trial started in late April, denies the allegations.

"For us, this is one of the most important cases. This is also a case where the victims are our colleagues," Darwish explained.

Human rights advocates Razan Zaitouneh, Wael Hamada, Samira Khalil, and Nazem Hammadi went missing after being abducted on December 9, 2013, in their offices in Douma.

The region was under the control of rebel groups at the time, including Jaysh al-Islam.

Stemming from the work done by SCM and other organisations, French judges have also issued two arrest warrants targeting Bashar al-Assad.

The work carried out by Darwish and his wife Bader has come at a cost: the lawyer was himself arrested in 2012 and tortured in Syrian prisons.

F.Garcia--SFF