On February 24
th, a court in Koblenz, Germany returned a conviction in the first trial on torture in the Syrian civil war. Eyad al-Gharib, a 44-year-old former intelligence officer under Bashar al-Assad’s regime, has been charged with four and a half years in prison for arresting over 30 protestors in 2011, whom the government would later detain, torture, and murder. Al-Gharib fled to Germany and obtained asylum status there, but was later arrested in 2019. The same court will soon hear another ex-officer who murdered 58 people.
Human rights observers have highly praised the trial. Anwar al-Bunni, a lawyer who was imprisoned by the Syrian government and later exiled to Germany, commented to the B.B.C. that the trial “represents the first step towards justice that the Syrian victims have truly felt… Although this trial is centred on two defendants … it targets the infernal machine of torture and murder.” On his Twitter, Steve Kostas, a lawyer who represents Syrian plainti