The dismissal before the assizes of three senior officials of the Syrian regime is “the culmination of a fight”, estimated on Tuesday April 4 on franceinfo Me Clémence Bectarte, lawyer for FIDH and the Syrian Center for the Media, specializing in international criminal law, international human rights law and international humanitarian law, while two French investigating judges ordered on Tuesday that three senior officials of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad be tried at the assizes for the death of two Franco-Syrian citizens, Mazzen Dabbagh and his son Patrick, arrested in 2013, according to an indictment order that franceinfo was able to consult. Through this procedure, Me Clémence Bectarte, lawyer for the family of the two disappeared, affirms that it is “must remember” that Syria “is a torture regime”. She also judges that it is “unthinkable to consider normalization with this regime”.
franceinfo. Why is this procedure important, even in the probable absence of the defendants?
It is important first of all because it is the culmination of a fight led by the Dabbagh family, this Franco-Syrian family which turned to French justice in 2016 to try to obtain justice. And then because the trial that was ordered today will be a great source of hope for the hundreds of thousands of Syrian victims who are still waiting for justice to be done. The fight against impunity must continue. We must continue to carry it out, at a time when we see the temptation to rehabilitate the Syrian regime with a certain number of countries which are trying to renew relations with Bashar al-Assad. So it is urgent, it is essential, in this context, to remember that it is a regime of torture.
The Syrian regime is gradually regaining its place on the international scene. There is talk of reintegration into the Arab League, of resuming diplomatic relations with certain major countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia. Is this also a motivation for you?
Of course. This is a great fear for all the Syrian victims, for the Syrian population itself, who continue to suffer from the repression of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. What you need to know is that we are not talking about crimes from the past, we are talking about crimes that are still being perpetrated. Today we have people who have disappeared in Syrian jails, families who have not recovered the bodies of their loved ones, the systematic use of torture which continues. It is urgent, in this context, to recall that it is impossible to envisage a normalization with the Syrian regime without there being justice and in any case no normalization with this regime.
Is the case of Mazzen Dabbagh’s family like thousands of cases in recent years in Syria?
Yes of course. We see nightly arrests at their homes for no reason. The family never understood why Patrick and Mazzen had been arrested on November 3 and 4, 2013. Then more news, which obviously plunged the whole family and their loved ones into terrible anguish. It was not until 2018 that we had confirmation of their death. But still today, the Dabbagh family does not know in what precise conditions they died and they could not recover their bodies to be able to bury them.