Crimes against humanity and war crimes are among the charges against Syria’s president in the warrant.
A court source and lawyers for the victims say that France has issued international arrest warrants for Syria’s president, his brother, and two other high-level officials over the use of banned chemical weapons against people in Syria.
A court source told Reuters on Wednesday that the arrest warrants charge Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher, and military generals Ghassan Abbas and Bassam al-Hassan with helping to commit crimes against humanity and war crimes. Lawyers for Syrian victims also confirmed these charges.
The rights group Civil Rights Defenders says that Maher al-Assad is in charge of the 4th Armoured Division, which is an elite military unit in Syria. The two military generals, Ghassan Abbas and Bassam al-Hassan, work for a Syrian research office that is suspected of making chemical weapons.
There was a criminal probe into the August 2013 chemical attacks in the town of Douma and the district of Eastern Ghouta that killed more than 1,000 people. This led to the warrants.
It’s the first international order for the head of state of Syria. In response to protests that started in 2011, his government’s forces cracked down violently, which UN experts say is the same thing as war crimes.
Mazen Darwish, a lawyer and founder of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), which filed the case in France, said that these are also the first foreign arrest warrants for people involved in the Ghouta chemical attack.
France says it has the power to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity all over the world.
Syria says it hasn’t used chemical weapons, but an investigation by the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found that the Syrian government did use chlorine as a weapon and the nerve agent sarin in an attack in April 2017.
