04 September 2023; MEMO: Syrian President, Bashar Al-Assad, announced yesterday that military field courts in the country have been disbanded, apparently ending the notorious process in which thousands are said to have been executed without due process.
In a statement by the Syrian presidency yesterday, Assad issued a legislative decree “ending the work” of the 1968 proclamation which initially created Syria’s military field courts, with the development going into effect immediately. “All cases referred to the military field courts are to be referred … to the military judiciary,” the statement clarified.
Those courts have been notorious over the decades, and particularly throughout the ongoing 12-year-long Syrian civil war, for sentencing at least thousands of civilians and political dissidents to death without due process, with the military field court trials infamously taking just a few minutes and leaving defendants with little or nothing to say in their defence, usually after a period of torture in the regime’s vast prison network.
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Prominent condemnations of the process include a 2017 report by Amnesty International, which stated that the courts’ rules and proceedings “are so summary and arbitrary that they cannot be considered to constitute an actual judicial process”. Thousands of people detained at Syria’s dreaded Sednaya prison had reportedly been killed in mass hangings after those so-called trials.
According to Syrian lawyer, Ghazwan Kronfol, who talked to the AFP news agency on the matter, the jurisdiction of those courts was expanded to civilians in the 1980s in direct response to unrest that swept throughout the country at the time. It had, since, operated as a tool to crush dissent, with “no role for the lawyer” and without any appeal possible for defendants.
Although the move by Assad is seen as seemingly positive by activists and lawyers such as Kronfol, he warned that it “should be treated with caution … particularly because the regime has never acknowledged that these courts violate detainees’ human rights”, as well as the fact that regime authorities are still able to detain people without trial.
