According to a court source on Wednesday, French judges have issued arrest warrants for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher al-Assad, and two other top officials in connection with the use of prohibited chemical weapons against people in Syria.
The allegations of involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity included in the arrest warrants stem from a criminal investigation into chemical strikes that occurred in August 2013 in the Eastern Ghouta area and the town of Douma, killing over a thousand people.
The Syrian president is the subject of the first-ever international arrest warrant. In response to demonstrations that started in 2011, his forces brutally suppressed the opposition, which U.N. experts have declared to be war crimes.
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These are also the first international arrest warrants that have been issued over the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, said Mazen Darwish, lawyer and founder of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), which filed the case in France.
Syria denies using chemical weapons but a previous joint inquiry of the United Nations and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found that the Syrian government used the nerve agent sarin in an April 2017 attack and has repeatedly used chlorine as a weapon.
The Syrian presidency and information ministry did not immediately reply for comment.
“The president is responsible for many crimes in Syria – but with this type of weapon in particular – sarin gas – it’s impossible to jump over the gap (of his involvement),” Darwish told Reuters, noting that approval from the president as commander of the armed forces would be mandatory.
Arrest warrants for sitting heads of state are rare because they generally enjoy immunity from prosecution. However, international law has exceptions to that immunity when a head of state is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity or genocide.
The International Criminal Court currently has two arrest warrants against heads of state: one against sitting Russian President Vladimir Putin and another against former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir.
Warrants were issued to Ghassam Abbas, director of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre (SSRC), the agency that established Syria’s chemical weapons programme, and Bassam al-Hassan, chief of security and liason officer.
Assad’s brother Maher was deemed complicit in his role as head of the fourth armoured division.
Judges from the crimes against humanity unit at the Paris Tribunal have issued arrest warrants for crimes committed by Syrian officials since 2011.
In October, French judges issued warrants for two former defence ministers over a 2017 bomb that killed a French-Syrian man at his home in Daraa.
