France Opens Criminal Investigation of Torture in Syria Under Assad

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/world/europe/france-investigates-syria-torture-bashar-assad.html

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PARIS — France has opened the world’s first criminal inquiry into torture under President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, officials and rights advocates said Wednesday, an indirect rebuke to Russia and its efforts to rehabilitate Mr. Assad as part of an international anti-Islamist coalition.

Based upon tens of thousands of harrowing photographs of torture victims taken by a Syrian defector, France’s investigation is in the early stages, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office said. It will require the discovery of a French victim, or the arrest of a Syrian official, to move forward, said the spokeswoman, Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre.

“Faced with these crimes that offend the human conscience, this bureaucracy of horror, faced with this denial of the values of humanity, it is our responsibility to act against the impunity of the killers,” the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said in a statement to Agence France-Presse announcing the investigation.

Rights advocates saluted the French move as important, even if largely symbolic for now. “It’s hugely significant,” said Toby Cadman, a British lawyer who has been assisting the Syrian opposition assemble a separate case based on the photographs. “It’s the first official investigation that’s been opened in relation to this evidence. The evidence is compelling and overwhelming. It’s great that the French are the first to do this.”

“The real test will be whether they can get live defendants before a French court,” Mr. Cadman added.

The French investigation arrives at a complicated moment in international diplomacy, as President Vladimir V. Putin tries to maneuver Mr. Assad back into respectability, with the United States and France fiercely resisting. Mr. Putin insisted in a speech on Monday before the United Nations General Assembly that Mr. Assad needed the world’s support to fight the Islamic State, and on Wednesday Russia carried out its first airstrikes in Syria, a move analysts interpreted as part of Mr. Putin’s effort to bolster the Syrian leader.

A spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry said at a news briefing Wednesday that Mr. Fabius had asked prosecutors to move forward with the case against the Assad government on Sept. 10, soon after authenticating “tens of thousands of photographs” taken by the defector, who is known as Caesar. A unit in the Paris prosecutor’s office specializing in mass crimes will take charge of the investigation, according to French press reports.

France, along with the United States, has taken the lead in insisting that Mr. Assad is a large part of the problem, and that he cannot be part of the solution.

“Assad can’t be the future of Syria,” Mr. Fabius said in an interview on French television on Tuesday. “You can’t maintain as its leader the person who is responsible for the chaos.”

Much in that view is informed by the photographs that form the basis of the case, taken by Caesar between 2011 and 2013. A former police photographer recruited by Syrian officials to take pictures of detainees, Caesar shot about 55,000 photos of victims — people with eyes gouged out, emaciated from starvation, beaten and maimed — and took them with him when he fled. Western governments have accepted his photos as authentic, and have said they reveal the scale of the abuses committed by the Assad government.

Human rights experts praised the government here for opening a criminal investigation into the government, pointing out that more people have been killed by Mr. Assad since the beginning of the Syrian civil war than by the Islamic State.

“It is a strong signal in the fight against impunity,” said Patrick Baudouin, a lawyer who is the head of the International Federation for Human Rights. “The Caesar file is extremely serious, not to say monstrous. We’re talking about a bureaucracy of barbarism.”