In the aftermath of Bashar al-Assad’s December 2024 ouster and flight to Moscow, JURIST’s Sarisha Harikrishna interviews Dr. Patrick Kroker, Senior Legal Advisor in the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin, about universal jurisdiction’s role in pursuing justice for Syrian crimes.

Universal jurisdiction empowers states to prosecute individuals accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and torture—regardless of where the crimes occurred or the nationalities involved. The principle rests on the idea that such crimes offend humanity as a whole and must not go unpunished, even when the state directly concerned is unable or unwilling to act.

Dr. Kroker brings firsthand experience to this discussion. He and his ECCHR team played a central role in Germany’s landmark Koblenz trial, which in 2022 secured the first-ever conviction worldwide for crimes committed by Assad’s security apparatus. The case demonstrated universal jurisdiction’s potential when domestic Syrian courts remain inaccessible and international tribunals are out of reach.

With Assad now beyond the reach of Syrian justice, universal jurisdiction has gained renewed urgency as a tool for survivor accountability.

Now that Bashar al-Assad has been ousted, what do you see as the biggest surprise in how universal jurisdiction has been used in Syria-related cases so far?

Patrick Kroker: I would divide my answer into two parts. In the beginning, I was actually a bit surprised in the way that it has been used. When we first started our work, in the preceding years, and this was an effort with Wolfgang Kaleck (with whom Dr. Kroker had penned a plethora of scholarly work on Syrian Torture Investigations in Germany and beyond), we outlined almost a decade of very restrictive application of universal jurisdiction in Europe, and especially in Germany. It was basically a law without application for a very long time and when we demanded for it to be applied in the Syria cases, a pretty blunt, pretty far-reaching demand, something that we were aware of, but I must say that the fact that it actually came to that did come in a way as a surprise to me. However, once this development has been ongoing for some time, maybe starting from 2020 or 2021 onwards, since then I must say that it has been applied in a coherent manner that I probably do not find it surprising anymore, but I would probably wish for it to be even further reaching than it has been applied since then.

JURIST: Do you think universal jurisdiction trials in Europe risk freezing Syria’s story into a narrow atrocity narrative rather than leaving space for Syrians to construct a more complex historical account of the conflict?

Kroker: The risk that you are describing is a real one and it needs to be taken seriously. I would never say that universal jurisdiction—so far away, especially—can be the answer to such a large-scale atrocity as happened in Syria. What it is and it is no more and no less is a first step to basically make a little hole in this huge wall of impunity that surrounded all of the crimes that have been committed. But in order to come to terms and also to legally deal with crimes of such magnitude and such brutality such as in Syria, many different steps need to be taken and universal jurisdiction was only the opener of this, a little crack in this wall. Hopefully it will be easier to apply another tool so that this wall of impunity will fall down, but as you rightly seem to suggest and you question, the overall, comprehensive answer must be a local one and a more Syrian one, and a more legitimate one. Universal jurisdiction is merely a bridge, not more and not less.

JURIST: Since universal jurisdiction trials occur far away from the homes of survivors, how do you think the courts will reconcile this with the need to have a gender-sensitive trauma framework?

Kroker: This is definitely one of the key aspects that need to be considered in this context. However, the answer always depends a lot on the actual procedural framework that you are working in and also how this framework is being applied by the courts. I would say that in general, yes, it is super important to apply such a framework and it totally depends on the law that you have in front of you and on the willingness of the actors to apply it so it is difficult to make a general assessment thus far. It is more on a case-by-case basis that one has to look at in this regard and how do we evaluate that.

JURIST: Looking beyond Syria, do you think that the jurisprudence developed in the Koblenz trial and other Syria-related universal jurisdiction prosecutions in Europe could serve as a lasting model or will they remain unique to the al-Assad era? (in reference to the ICJ’s 2023 South Africa v. Israel judgment)

Kroker: I would hope that it is not isolated, but of course it always depends on which kind of law you apply, for example the ICJ would apply the Genocide Convention or the Anti-Torture Convention. The German Code of Crimes Against International Law, the ICC, the Rome Statute and so on, so you always have to see if there are comparable elements in these laws. That being said, however, I think that there is much that courts can draw from each other that can kind of cross-fertilize and as much as I would want a German court to take an ICJ interpretation into account, I would hope that the many decisions that have been taken and to give you one concrete example may be of a new indictment that will lead to a trial in Koblenz starting this winter about starvation as a war crime and it will be the first time that a German court applies this crime in the case of the Yarmuk neighbourhood in Damascus and this is for example something that once this jurisprudence is developed, it could be used concerning Gaza, concerning many other places in this world where starvation is actively being applied as a method of war. So my hope is that universal jurisdiction is not seen as isolated but is seen as part of the general ecosystem of international justice and also in the sense of the jurisprudence that comes out of it and possible precedents that can be set.