Fadel Abdulghany, the founder of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), told Al Jazeera that the moment carries deep symbolic weight.
“A judge once sentenced to death by the Assad regime for defending the rule of law has returned to the bench to apply that same law to one of the regime’s most extensively documented perpetrators of violations,” Abdulghany explained. “This reversal of power dynamics reflects the promise of the rule of law so rarely fulfilled in post-authoritarian transitions. The significance of this moment lies not in spectacle but in its adherence to due process.”
Abdulghany stressed that “this is neither a revolutionary court nor a victors’ court” but a case that has moved through formal legal stages, including arrest by the Ministry of Interior, investigation, prosecution and referral to a criminal court in Damascus.
The charges include premeditated murder and torture leading to death, classified as crimes against humanity under international law. This framing, Abdulghany said, is deliberate: It places domestic proceedings within the framework of international criminal standards, which is essential for the credibility of any verdict.
Abdulghany also highlighted the institutional message of the trial and in particular the inclusion of the former president and his brother as defendants despite their absence from the proceedings and from Syria.
“Physical absence does not amount to legal immunity,” he said.
Despite this, Abdulghany stressed that the trial was not the end of the transitional justice process in a country where hundreds of thousands of people died and disappeared during the war and the five-decade rule of al-Assad and his father, Hafez. There is still little information in many of the cases of the disappeared and imprisoned. The SNHR has documented at least 177,000 cases of enforced disappearances since 2011 with the vast majority attributed to the former government.
Abdulghany explained that accountability in Syria cannot be reduced to criminal trials alone and instead must include four interconnected pillars: criminal accountability, truth-seeking, reparations and institutional reform.
These, he argued, must function together under a unified structure rather than as separate or sequential processes.
Abdulghany placed particular emphasis on institutional reform, noting that Syria’s judiciary was previously used as a tool of repression rather than justice.
“Without these reforms, transitional justice trials risk being conducted through judicial institutions that have not themselves been transformed,” he said, pointing to the need to dismantle exceptional courts and rebuild judicial independence.
Truth-seeking, he added, is equally essential.
Families of victims have a right to know what happened to their relatives, and this right exists independently of criminal prosecutions, Abdulghany said.
“They deserve answers,” he said, adding that recognition of truth, justice and reparations must be unconditional if any durable reconciliation is to be achieved.
