Fadel Abdulghany
For more than fourteen years, the following question has been the most pressing one among Syrian victims and their families: what will all this documentation that you carry out at the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) eventually lead to? And for most of that period, the honest answer was closer to a conviction than to a tangible proof, namely that the information, once preserved with sufficient care, would retain its value until the judicial avenues are opened, and that nothing documented in this manner would go to waste.
In August 2026, that conviction acquired a tangible judicial dimension for the first time inside Syria, after we had employed it in several cases and reports outside Syria, as the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus issued rulings in three cases to which years of accumulated documentation had contributed. On 11 August, it sentenced Atef Najib to death in his presence, and issued in absentia death sentences against Bashar al-Assad, Maher al-Assad, and five other fugitive defendants; on 18 August, it sentenced Wassim Badi’ al-Assad to death in his presence; and on 24 August, it sentenced Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassoun to life imprisonment. However, the road from documentation to accountability isn’t a direct one, since it remains for the court to decide what each item of material is capable of proving, what weight ought to be assigned to it, and whether it suffices to establish individual criminal responsibility. And these assessments, not the mere contribution of information, are what draw the limits of what documentation can claim once a case reaches the courtroom.
The first point, and the most fundamental one, concerns the difference between the human rights record and judicial evidence. Including an incident in a documentation database doesn’t, in and of itself, make it conclusive evidence, for each of the two has a different place along the path of justice. Documentation gathers accounts of incidents, of victims, and of patterns of violations, verifies them and preserves them under requirements of confidentiality and source protection, whereas the court decides admissibility and probative value after the parties have been given the opportunity to challenge the material and to argue over it. Documentation supplies the adjudication process with materials, yet it doesn’t itself undertake the adjudication. And this cautionary observation protects the trial from importing untested conclusions, just as it protects the record itself from losing credibility if the court decides, in accordance with its own rules, not to treat a particular item as evidence. Hence, the credibility of documentation rests on not attributing to it claims that exceed what its methodology is able to prove.
And this methodology is what allows the record to withstand scrutiny. Since 2011, the documentation has rested on the databases of SNHR, which record victims, incidents, and patterns of violations, supported by archives comprising testimonies, visual materials, and temporal and spatial data. The steps followed may appear simple when described, yet applying them requires a high degree of precision: collecting information from multiple sources, cross-verifying it, re-examining it whenever new information arrives, and protecting sources in line with the do-no-harm principle and on the basis of a clear purpose for collecting the information. As for digital and open-source materials, the Berkeley Protocol constitutes a reference for verifying and preserving them, without replacing the independent methodologies that govern interviews and testimonies. This methodological rigor matters because the court may later test the material’s provenance, its reliability, and its context. So it follows that a rigorous methodology doesn’t by itself turn the record into evidence, but it increases the likelihood of its withstanding this examination, and it prevents conferring upon documentation an authority that only the judiciary can grant.
Alongside this first separation, there is a second separation between two functions that are easily confused. The first consists in documenting and submitting information to the competent authorities within guarantees of protection for sources and victims, while the second consists in monitoring trials and assessing their procedures in light of Syrian law and the international standards of fair trial. Submitting information to the court doesn’t pre-empt the outcome of the trial, nor does it determine the individual responsibility of any person, just as referring to a judicial ruling doesn’t mean endorsing the legal characterization the court has adopted, or its interpretation of the evidence, or the penalty it has imposed, all of which remain subject to appeal. And keeping these two functions separate contributes to limiting the risk of conflating documentation with prosecution, and it helps to preserve the independence of each of them.
The necessity of not overstating reaches its peak, within the scope of what can be proven, when the matter concerns causation, and this becomes clearly apparent in the handling of speech. Comparing the defendant’s statements with documented incidents, and aligning them temporally and spatially, produces material amenable to analysis, not evidence in itself of causation. Temporal coincidence alone isn’t sufficient to establish the link that the criminal law requires between the utterances, the intent of the defendant, and the acts attributed to him. And the ruling issued against Hassoun reflected this reserve in its very structure, as the discursive dimension was dealt with through a specific offense in the Syrian Penal Code, at a time where the international crimes were linked to acts of support. The separation between association and criminal contribution is a condition that the law imposes when responsibility is attributed, and documentation abides by this condition rather than settling it itself.
The most difficult aspect of the tension appears at a time where these proceedings end in sentences whose severity we may not agree with, therefore contributing information in such cases, or monitoring them, doesn’t mean accepting the penalty they end up with. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Syria is a party, doesn’t prohibit the death penalty absolutely in the states that have not abolished it, but it confines it to the most serious crimes, which the Human Rights Committee interprets, in its General Comment No. 36, as the crimes of extreme gravity involving intentional killing.
What grants the transition from documentation to accountability its credibility is a set of restraints founded on abstention: abstaining from treating an entry in a database as evidence, or a contribution of information as an endorsement of a ruling, or the observation of a single session as a judgment on the trial in its entirety, or participation in a case as approval of the penalty issued in it. And the answer that the victims have awaited for fourteen years has begun to take shape in the courtrooms, with these rulings remaining subject to appeal, and with accountability being broader than any single conviction. The value of documentation doesn’t lie in its replacing the judicial ruling, but in preserving a record marked by a degree of rigor that allows the court to test it and to rely on it whenever it finds its material relevant and reliable. Thus, documentation serves justice with the greatest measure of credibility when it maintains the line separating the recording of what happened from the determination of guilt, and this line is what grants the record its standing.
