High-Profile Trials

In August 11, 2026, the Fourth Syrian Criminal Court sentenced to death former President Bashar al-Assad and seven other members of the former regime. They included al-Assad’s brother Maher, who was also the head of the Fourth Armored Division, after a trial in absentia. Atef Najib, the one-time head of the Political Security Directorate branch in Daraa and a cousin of the Assads, was sentenced in person. After a hearing that began on April 26, 2026, the defendants were found guilty of charges including murder, torture, and crimes against humanity for their roles in repressing the uprising that began in 2011.

An Overdue Reckoning

For many Syrians, these verdicts are symbolically important. They establish individual responsibility at the very highest levels of the former regime for atrocities committed against Syrians. No less a personage than Bashar al-Assad himself has been held accountable for decisions made during his presidency. It was on the watch of the now-sentenced Atef Najib, that in March 2011 15 children were detained and tortured in Daraa, which sparked the first widespread protests in the southern governorate. For many Syrians, this bitter reckoning has been long overdue.

Daraa in Focus

In political terms, the new Syrian authorities are doing more than prosecuting individual crimes. With Daraa, the cradle of the revolution, at the center of the first efforts at delivering accountability, the rulings deliver official judgment on the origins of Syria’s long and brutal civil war. The protestors of 2011 are exonerated, the state’s repression of the demonstrations criminalized ex-post, and senior political and security officials convicted.

An Official Record and a New Order

The trials of 2026 are part of the way in which Syria’s new political order is constructing an authoritative account of the old one. Courts do not only punish individuals: they classify and interpret actions, attribute responsibility, and establish an official record of the past. In post-civil war countries, trials of the former leadership are not just an essential component of transitional justice, but part of a broader process through which the new order seeks its own legitimation while further delegitimating the regime it replaced.

Legal Shortcomings

Syria’s trials nevertheless face serious problems of judicial capacity and procedure. Monitors who attended the Najib trial documented inadequate legal representation, hasty proceedings, and a gap between witness testimonies and the crimes with which Najib was charged. Syria’s legal architecture is also fragile. The defendants have apparently been convicted of crimes against humanity, yet crimes against humanity are not codified as a distinct offence in the 1949 Syrian Penal Code. Syria ratified the 1948 Genocide Convention but never incorporated international definitions into its domestic criminal law. Moreover, Syria is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which provides contemporary definitions of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The 2025 Constitutional Declaration made by President Ahmad al-Sharaa attempts to bridge this gap by allowing retrospective prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed under the former regime.

Institutional Capacity

The eviscerated institutional capacity of the Syrian state only compounds the legal problems. Nearly 6,000 former regime personnel are now reportedly held in detention in Syria. Even if the courts processed 500 cases annually, the backlog would take years to resolve, placing an enormous burden on a judicial system already hollowed out by 14 years of conflict.

Confronting a Traumatic Past

Transitional justice is intended in part to allow societies to confront a traumatic past and establish the conditions for some form of collective political settlement. With Bashar al-Assad sentenced in absentia, some Syrians may feel cheated of seeing the former ruler brought before a court, interrogated, and made to stand face-to-face with the survivors of his torturous regime. Moreover, some members of the new political elite may feel these rulings have foregone an opportunity to stage a political trial that might be televised – or more likely livestreamed – becoming a key event in the Syrian public memory and convincing Syrians of the new authorities’ popular credentials and commitment to breaking with the past.

The Iraq Example

Using political trials to showcase the beginnings of a new era can also reinvigorate precisely the antagonisms they are intended to calm, as the trial of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2006, following the US-led invasion of the country, attests. Hussein famously used the courtroom to grandstand: he challenged the legitimacy of the court itself, insisted that he remained Iraq’s lawful president, and dismissed the proceedings as instigated by foreign occupiers. In effect, he flipped the script by trying to transform a judicial reckoning with the old regime into a political argument about the legitimacy of the new one.

Syria, of course, is not Iraq. Support for the overthrown Assad regime has largely gone underground, but it has not necessarily disappeared. Future highly publicized trials could provide an arena in which these old political allegiances reemerge, potentially becoming entangled with the sectarian and communal tensions that have periodically flared across different parts of Syria since the new government took power. Najib’s death sentence is currently on hold pending the conclusion of a second trial focusing on his post-2011 involvement in abuses committed in Idlib, the former base of operations of the rebel coalition that brought Ahmad al-Sharaa to power. The second trial will tell a great deal about the new authorities’ maturing approach to transitional justice – and the prospects for pro-Assad revanchism.

The Challenges of Transitional Justice

The challenge for Syria is whether accountability for atrocities committed by the old regime can be achieved within a credible and coherent system of law. For the new authorities, the question is also whether legal accountability for the old regime can help legitimize the new political order that is still under construction – all without fueling the underlying conflicts that transitional justice is intended to overcome.