Fadel Abdulghany,
It may be easy to reduce the ruling issued on 27 August 2026 by the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus against Abdul Nasser Barraqi to a familiar image: a person alleged to have been an informant for the ousted regime, sentenced to death, his assets confiscated, and denied mitigating circumstances. However, the case, beyond this framing, raises a question about accountability: what are the limits of the individual criminal responsibility of persons who weren’t at the head of a security apparatus, and who didn’t personally carry out torture, yet whose deliberate acts contributed to transferring the victims into a system of detention, disappearance and death?
According to the official account of the court, Barraqi was convicted of the crimes of enforced disappearance, deprivation of liberty, complicity in intentional homicide, torture leading to death, robbery with violence, and criminal false denunciation. The court merged the penalties, imposed the harshest penalties available, and made the confiscation of his assets enforceable. The court relied on international law in characterising some of the acts as war crimes and crimes against humanity, while it applied Syrian law in determining the penalties. As for the full judgment, including its reasoning, it hasn’t been published yet.
The status of “informant” doesn’t in itself create a legal position. Criminal law doesn’t punish persons on account of the labels attributed to them, but rather punishes acts once the legal elements of responsibility have been established. The question is whether the accused knowingly committed acts that rendered him, under a specific legal rule, criminally responsible for what followed. And any departure from this principle turns the prosecution into a collective attribution of responsibility, and undermines the commitment to the rule of law that transitional justice is supposed to seek to entrench.
Criminal complicity constitutes the pivotal legal issue. Articles 218 and 219 of the Syrian Penal Code of 1949 attribute criminal responsibility to persons who provide instructions, or who strengthen the resolve of the principal perpetrator, or who assist in acts that prepare for the crime, facilitate it, or complete it. And the penalty is graded according to the gravity of the contribution: thus the accomplice without whose assistance the crime wouldn’t have been committed is punished with the same penalty as the principal perpetrator, whereas the remaining accomplices are punished with a lighter penalty, that is hard labour for life or for a fixed term of twelve to twenty years where the penalty of the perpetrator is death.
The fact that the penalty reached its maximum in the case of Barraqi indicates that the court applied the first paragraph of Article 219, and thus treated him as an accomplice whose contribution was decisive, and not as an ordinary accomplice to whom the lighter penalty applies.
In principle, these two articles can apply to a person who never entered a detention centre; that is, to the informant who merely passed on the information without himself taking part in the arrest or in what followed it. However, that is conditional upon two matters: that he provided the information deliberately and with the intent of causing the arrest, and that the remaining legal conditions for complicity in the crimes that followed, whether torture, disappearance or killing, are met in his regard. And this legal theory isn’t new. As for what appears new in the current course of transitional justice, it is its public application to a person alleged to have been a security informant, in respect of crimes said to have resulted from his reports.
International criminal jurisprudence offers a useful comparative reference, even if its standard doesn’t correspond to Syrian law. Thus the case law of the two International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda has described aiding and abetting as the provision of assistance, encouragement or moral support having a substantial effect on the commission of the crime, coupled with the knowledge of the accused that his assistance facilitated its commission. This formulation doesn’t require proof that the crime would have been impossible without the contribution of the accused. Rather, what must be established is the existence of a specific individual link between the assistance, its substantial effect on the commission of the crime, and the knowledge of the accused that his contribution facilitated its occurrence.
At the level of punishment, this comparative reference reveals a principal difference: the two international tribunals don’t know the death penalty, and the most they can impose is life imprisonment, with the penalty assessed in each case on its own. Their jurisprudence has also settled on the position that aiding and abetting is a lesser form of responsibility by comparison to direct commission, or ordering the crime, or participation in a joint criminal enterprise, and that it therefore warrants a lighter penalty.
And this distinction is of a similar weight in relation to the charge of false denunciation. Article 393 of the Penal Code criminalises knowingly denouncing an innocent person, and provides for an aggravated form of the crime, punishable by imprisonment from ten to fifteen years, when the false denunciation leads to the issuance of a judicial ruling of death or of life imprisonment.
