Fadel Abdulghany
The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 opened a historic window for Syria to confront one of the deepest challenges facing societies emerging from conflict: how to ensure that the systematic abuses that lasted for more than five decades are not repeated.
This issue concerns the redesign of institutions, the reconstruction of society, and a profound transformation of the cultural patterns and individual attitudes that allowed mass atrocities to persist for decades. The concept of “guarantees of non-recurrence,” as grounded in the framework of transitional justice, provides an analytical lens through which the Syrian state’s preventive commitments can be assessed, planned, and monitored.
The duty to prevent the recurrence of gross violations of human rights is closely linked to international law; the Human Rights Committee has affirmed that the purposes of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights would be undermined in the absence of a genuine commitment, under Article 2, to take measures to prevent the recurrence of violations.
What distinguishes guarantees of non-recurrence from other pillars of transitional justice is their preventive nature. Criminal justice contributes to prevention primarily through deterrence, while truth commissions play a preventive role through investigation, clarification, and recommendations, and reparations empower victims to claim their rights and receive compensation more effectively. However, guarantees of non-recurrence encompass all these contributions and extend them to a broader range of planned and diverse interventions aimed at reducing the likelihood of violations recurring. The subject of these guarantees is the prevention of grave violations and serious breaches of international humanitarian law, violations that presuppose a systematic abuse of power based on entrenched organizational structures and patterns of behavior.
The violations committed in Syria during the Assad era were characterized by this systematic nature; torture was institutionalized, enforced disappearances were widespread, and chemical weapons were used against the civilian population. Furthermore, the entire state apparatus, from the security services to the judiciary, was designed to ensure the perpetuation of these violations.
Institutional Interventions: Rebuilding Governing Rules
The framework for guarantees of non-recurrence at the institutional level outlines a series of phased interventions, beginning with foundational preconditions and extending to comprehensive constitutional reform. In the Syrian context, two issues stand out as particularly urgent: security for all and legal identity. Establishing effective security in full compliance with human rights standards is essential, but Syria, emerging from more than a decade of multifaceted conflict, faces enormous challenges in this area. Equally important is the issue of legal identity, as international and regional human rights law recognizes the right to legal identity in times of both peace and conflict. Conflict often undermines this right through weakened state presence, mass displacement, loss of documentation, and the deliberate destruction of records. Syria has witnessed all of these phenomena on a massive scale, with millions of Syrians lacking documentation and civil registries in numerous governorates damaged or destroyed. Without addressing this deficit, victims will be unable to access justice, seek reparations, or exercise their most basic civil rights.
In addition to these preconditions, Syria must embark on a comprehensive legal reform process. Integrating international crimes into national legislation is essential, both to comply with Syria’s obligations under international law and to address the challenges of statutes of limitations and the principle of non-retroactivity of laws, which have historically been used as pretexts for failing to hold perpetrators of systematic violations accountable. The principle that war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are not subject to any statute of limitations is a peremptory norm of international law and must be clearly reflected in Syria’s new legal framework.
Judicial reform stands out as perhaps the most important institutional intervention of all. Under Assad, the Syrian judiciary was part of the system of violations rather than a guarantor of rights. The courts became tools in the hands of the executive authority, endorsing arbitrary arrests, legitimizing torture practices, and contributing to protecting perpetrators of violations instead of holding them accountable.
In such contexts, three key priorities emerge: vetting and vetting judicial personnel, strengthening judicial independence, and developing specialized expertise to investigate mass atrocities. While vetting and vetting must respect due process and the principle of separation of powers, they remain unavoidable. A judiciary whose members were entirely appointed under the previous regime, and which is widely perceived as complicit in serious violations, will face significant challenges in gaining the public trust necessary to fulfill its corrective and preventive functions.
Structural reforms are equally important, as without them the ability of the courts to monitor the executive branch will remain dependent on the integrity of specific individuals, rather than on stable institutional guarantees.
Structural reforms are equally important, as without them the ability of the courts to monitor the executive branch will remain dependent on the integrity of specific individuals, rather than on stable institutional guarantees.
Community Interventions and the Role of Civil Society
However, guarantees of non-recurrence are not limited to institutional reform alone. Effective prevention of violations requires a change in practice. In the context of past mass violations, state institutions are often weak, ineffective, or corrupt. This makes the role of civil society crucial. Civil society’s contribution to preventing recurrence has a preemptive logic: it has the capacity for collective mobilization against the dismantling power of authoritarianism by reducing the cost of demanding rights. Syrian civil society has demonstrated resilience throughout the years of conflict by documenting violations, preserving evidence, and continuing advocacy despite existential threats. This capacity must now be protected and expanded, not restricted by stifling legal and bureaucratic frameworks.
Legal empowerment programs targeting historically marginalized groups, particularly women and internally displaced persons, can restore a sense of agency that has been undermined by mass abuses and encourage broader participation in transitional justice mechanisms. In a strong civil society, where individuals and groups are empowered to exercise their rights, the likelihood of those rights being violated decreases.
Cultural Transformation and its Psychological and Social Dimensions
Deeper and more sustainable transformations require interventions that extend beyond institutional and societal spheres to encompass culture and individual orientations. Culture and personality structures play a fundamental role in stabilizing social relations and, by their very nature, resist deliberate change, though they are not immune to it. In transitional contexts, education possesses particular preventative potential, as it can shape new norms, mediate conflicting narratives about the past, and foster a culture of democratic citizenship. In Syria, where the Ba’athist regime exploited education for decades to entrench its authoritarian ideology, educational reform is a crucial component of any credible policy to prevent recurrence.
Archives containing records of mass violations play a crucial educational role in countering denial and historical revisionism, ensuring that primary sources are available to future generations. Therefore, the vast Syrian documentary record of the Assad regime’s atrocities, including evidence of systematic torture, chemical attacks, and enforced disappearances, must be preserved, protected, and made accessible within regulatory frameworks that balance the public interest with the privacy rights of victims and witnesses.
Finally, trauma counseling and psychosocial support services must be firmly established as essential components of a non-recurrence policy in Syria. When structural violence and unaddressed trauma intersect with high levels of inequality and displacement, the likelihood of new cycles of violence increases. Furthermore, reshaping the identities of victims and perpetrators, and rebuilding civic trust vertically between the state and its citizens, and horizontally among local communities, cannot be achieved through punitive measures alone. To suggest otherwise is to overestimate the capacity of the criminal justice system and underestimate the depth of the harm and fragmentation suffered by the Syrian people.
Finally, ensuring non-recurrence in post-Assad Syria requires a comprehensive, multidimensional policy that operates simultaneously across institutional, societal, and cultural spheres. Just as the conflict in Syria and its accompanying violations were multidimensional, the response to them must be equally multidimensional. Sustained political will and international support are essential to transforming this commitment into an irreversible, structural reality.
