Fadel Abdulghany
The transfer of control over detention facilities formerly run by the Syrian Democratic Forces to the current Syrian government marks a turning point in holding perpetrators of human rights abuses committed within these facilities accountable. Rather than relieving the state of its investigative obligations, this transfer establishes a direct legal responsibility to protect and preserve evidence and ensure that no suspect escapes accountability.
These facilities, located in the Syrian Jazeera region, have been documented as sites of enforced disappearances, torture, and deaths in detention, and contain crucial evidence for any future criminal accountability proceedings. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) still hold at least 3,705 forcibly disappeared persons and have killed 122 people under torture since their inception.
The principle of transferring authority to investigate past violations and preserve evidence is a well-established principle in international law; when control of detention facilities is transferred from one authority to another, the receiving authority has a direct legal responsibility to protect the integrity of potential crime scenes and ensure the effectiveness of accountability mechanisms.
Under international law, the current Syrian authorities are obligated to investigate potentially unlawful deaths and serious human rights violations occurring within their territory or jurisdiction. This obligation extends to facilities formerly controlled by non-state actors, including the Syrian Democratic Forces, and covers all evidence found at those sites.
The Minnesota Protocol on the Investigation of Potentially Unlawful Deaths provides guidance on the nature of these obligations, emphasizing that investigations must be prompt, effective, thorough, independent, impartial, and transparent. The strength of these requirements is particularly evident in the context of detention facilities where patterns of death and ill-treatment have been documented. Complementarily, the Istanbul Protocol stipulates that detention facilities where torture or ill-treatment has occurred must be treated as crime scenes, with forensic experts obligated to protect the chain of possession of all categories of evidence, including statements, physical evidence, medical and legal evidence, and digital evidence.
A number of international instruments affirm specific obligations regarding the preservation of evidence in detention facilities formerly under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance obligates states to maintain accurate records, search for, locate, and identify missing persons. Given the documented patterns of enforced disappearance in these facilities, these obligations fall on the Syrian government as the current authority in charge of these sites.
The requirements of the agreement are not limited to record-keeping, but also include taking effective measures to determine the fate and whereabouts of persons who have been detained without acknowledgment, ensuring that the routes of arrest, transfer and detention can be traced, and that undisclosed burial or detention locations can be revealed where appropriate.
In this context, evidentiary materials found in facilities such as Al-Aqtan prison and Al-Hol camp, including administrative records and detainee files, configurations of places of detention, restraint or torture devices, possible biological samples, digital systems, and any associated burial sites, constitute crucial evidence in any potential prosecutions before Syrian courts or before foreign jurisdictions under universal jurisdiction, as well as being useful in truth-finding and victim identification processes.
The practical aspects of preserving evidence are of paramount importance, because any procedural flaw in collecting, preserving, or documenting evidence may lead to questioning its credibility or to its subsequent exclusion, regardless of the severity of the violations. This directly infringes upon victims’ rights to truth, justice, and reparation. The experience of reopening detention facilities after December 2024 demonstrates how irretrievably evidence can be lost without immediate safeguards and clear access rules.
There are multiple sources of threat to the integrity and reliability of evidence, including deliberate destruction by perpetrators, unauthorized entry by families searching for information about their missing relatives, and removal of documents by journalists or researchers. Therefore, the Syrian government must deploy trained security personnel to establish physical protection zones, implement strict entry protocols requiring written authorizations and complete entry and exit records, and prevent any removal, transfer, or damage to site contents until specialized teams have documented them according to professional standards.
Digital evidence, including surveillance systems, computer files, and electronic communications, requires immediate forensic imaging using anti-writing techniques to prevent accidental alteration, along with the calculation of encrypted hash values to verify data integrity and prevent tampering. A chain of possession must be established from the moment evidence is collected, with meticulous documentation of each receipt, transfer, deposit, or examination, ensuring the evidence meets the admissibility requirements of national and international proceedings.
The Syrian government’s responsibility for preserving crime scenes in former Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) detention facilities stems from fundamental principles of international law governing states’ obligations to investigate gross human rights violations. The transfer of control over these facilities does not diminish the duty to ensure accountability; rather, it directly transfers this duty to the receiving authority, which has effective jurisdiction over the sites and the evidence they contain. The normative frameworks provided by the Minnesota and Istanbul Protocols, along with relevant obligations arising from the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and standards for cooperation and preservation of evidence, affirm that detention facilities must be treated as crime scenes requiring the professional and systematic preservation of all evidence.
If the evidence in these facilities is protected and handled according to rigorous professional standards, it can fulfill the requirements for criminal accountability, truth-seeking, and victim identification, particularly for victims of enforced disappearances that have lasted for years. Conversely, the loss of evidence due to damage, contamination, or tampering represents an irreparable loss, not only in terms of individual prosecutions but also in terms of building a reliable historical record of violations committed against Syrians.
