About the author(s):
Katharine Fortin is an Associate Professor at Utrecht University where she teaches IHL and IHRL. Before joining Utrecht University, she worked at the ICTY, ICC and Norton Rose Fulbright. She is the author of The Accountability of Armed Groups under Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2017) which won the 2018 Lieber Prize. She has written widely about the framework of law that applies to armed groups in non-international armed conflicts and is one of the editors of the Armed Groups and International Law blog.
In yesterday’s news roundup, we referred to an article in the Guardian telling of a report containing evidence of ‘industrial scale’ killing by the Syrian regime. Today, the Guardian has provided a link to the report itself which can be found here.
The report was prepared Carter Ruck & Co Solicitors in London with the mandate to determine the credibility of a defector from Syria whose occupation prior to his defection was in the service of the military police of the Syrian government.
The report tells how in that capacity the defector had been in the military police and in that role it fell to him to photograph scenes of crimes. With the onset of the civil war the nature of his occupation changed and his new duties, and those of his colleagues, now were to photograph and document the bodies of those brought from their places of detention to a military hospital.
According to the report, the bodies he photographed since the civil war began, showed signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation, and other forms of torture and killing.
The report tells how during the course of his work, the defector who was codenamed “Caesar” smuggled out some tens of thousands of images of corpses so photographed by his colleagues and himself. In all, approximately fifty-?five thousand (55,000) images have, to date, been made available outside Syria by these processes. As there were some four or five photographs taken of each body this approximates to there being images of about eleven thousand (11,000) dead detainees.
Having carefully interviewed “Caesar” and evaluated his evidence in light of the exhibits available to it, the inquiry team found him, for its part, to be a truthful and credible witness. He revealed no signs of being ‘sensational’; nor did he seem partisan. Although he was a supporter of those who opposed the present regime, the inquiry team was satisfied that he gave an honest account of his experiences.
The legal component of the inquiry team was comprised of The Right Honourable Sir Desmond de Silva QC (Chairman), Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC and Professor David M. Crane.