Austrian court sentences former members of Assad regime to 8 years in prison

The Vienna Regional Court on Monday sentenced two former high-ranking officials of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad‘s regime to eight years in prison.

The first official, named only as Khaled al-H. under Austrian privacy rules, was the head of the General Intelligence Directorate’s Branch 335 in Raqqa from at least 2009 until 2013. The other defendant, Mussab Abou R., is a former Syrian police lieutenant colonel who served as the head of investigations for the Criminal Security Branch (criminal police) in Raqqa from April 2011 until March 2013.

The prosecution charged them with offenses including aggravated assault, aggravated coercion, torture and sexual assault against a total of 21 civilians.

The verdicts are not yet final. The defendants requested time to consider their options.

According to the prosecutor, both defendants portrayed themselves as powerless before the court in Vienna. Much like criminals of the Nazi regime in Germany under Adolf Hitler, they “portrayed themselves as small cogs in the machine.”

However, the prosecution went on to argue that due to their positions, the defendants “were pillars of the police and secret service regime under Assad—a system that systematically practiced torture.”

In his reasoning for the verdict, the judge explained that both defendants acted as “guardians” of their prisoners. According to the judge, they “should have ensured that these prisoners were protected.”

On the other hand, the judge said, “they should have ensured that their subordinates did not use violence against the prisoners.”

“The prosecution portrays my client as the all-powerful boss, but he was not,” countered Khaled al-H.’s defense attorney.

“Bad things happened” at the notorious Syrian investigative commission, but his client was not a member of the commission, the defense attorney said.

In his closing statement, Mussab Abou R.’s defense attorney focused on the charge of sexual coercion, since a conviction on that count carries a harsher sentence.

The defense attorney explained that while it had been “a terrible act of violence, it was not a sexual offense.”

“The victims will suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives. There will never be justice for this. But as victims, they have the chance to achieve a measure of justice by at least holding the perpetrators accountable,” said a representative of the Vienna-based non-profit organization the Centre for the Enforcement of Human Rights International (CEHRI), which represented 18 of the victims, after the verdict was handed down.

In the world’s first trial concerning state-sponsored torture in Syria, a court in Germany sentenced a former employee of the Syrian intelligence service to life in prison in early 2022 for crimes against humanity, 27 counts of murder, torture and other offenses.

In Sweden, a former Syrian soldier was convicted of war crimes in 2017.

In Syria itself, a high-ranking former officer is on trial for the first time since May.