On May 10, 2026, the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus held its second hearing in the trial of Major General Atef Najib, a former head of Political Security in Deraa and cousin to former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Najib is the first senior figure from the former regime to appear before a Syrian court. He is being tried alongside several other high-ranking officials, who are being prosecuted in absentia. The atmosphere was in stark contrast to the first hearing on April 26, when the courthouse doors were wide open. This time, the families of victims who had travelled from Deraa (southwestern Syria) were not allowed to attend the proceedings. Some waited outside the courthouse holding signs demanding justice. Inside, the tone was more subdued. The shouts, revolutionary chants, and ululations of the previous hearing were replaced by an attentive silence.
Najib, seated in a steel cage to the right of the judges’ bench and dressed in a striped prison uniform, appeared calm. Unshackled, with his hands clasped, he observed the courtroom closely under the watchful eye of police officers in dark blue uniforms. Facing him was the presiding judge, Fakhir al-Din al-Arian, flanked by his associate judges and the Damascus Attorney General, Husam Khattab. The presiding judge opened the hearing, which is being partially broadcast by several Syrian media outlets.
Torture, killing and cracking down on protests
The public part of this hearing, which continues in closed session with the questioning of the defendant, is devoted to reading the indictment and presenting the charges against him. The acts in question took place primarily in 2011 in Deraa, a city in southern Syria considered the cradle of the Syrian revolution.
According to the prosecution, the forces led by Najib notably arrested children who had written anti-regime slogans on the walls of their school. These minors allegedly suffered physical and psychological torture, including electric shocks, severe beatings, and the pulling out of fingernails. Some are said to have died under torture.
Najib allegedly rejected mediation attempts by Deraa’s community leaders and led the armed crackdown on peaceful protests -- using live ammunition, storming the Omari Mosque, preventing medical aid from reaching the wounded, and systematically resorting to arbitrary detention and torture. He held a central position in the security chain of command in Deraa, allegedly supervising or ordering operations that led to serious abuses against civilians.
During his opening statement, Prosecutor General Khattab described the crackdown carried out by the Deraa authorities as a turning point that helped set the country ablaze.
Qualification of crimes remains tenuous
One of the most striking aspects of this hearing lies in the legal qualification of the crimes adopted by the court.
According to presiding judge Fakhir al-Din al-Arian, the alleged acts constitute, in particular, “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”. To justify this qualification, he cited several international instruments, including the Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. He also cited the constitutional declaration promulgated in March 2025, which provides for the incorporation into Syrian law of international conventions ratified by Syria [namely the Convention against Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but not the Geneva Conventions]. Finally, he cited Article 49 of the Constitutional Declaration, which stipulates that “war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and all crimes committed by the former regime are excluded from the principle of non-retroactivity of laws”.
But this qualification of the crimes raises significant legal questions.
In a follow-up report on this hearing, the Syrian organization My Rights Mena argues that characterizing the acts as “war crimes” raises questions under international humanitarian law. The acts for which Najib is charged date back to early 2011, before the situation escalated into a non-international armed conflict. The report argues, however, that the classification as crimes against humanity appears to correspond “to the widespread and systematic nature of the violations committed against civilians during that period”.
Another difficulty is that Syrian law contains no provisions explicitly criminalizing war crimes and crimes against humanity. As in the Aleppo trial, the judge therefore relies on articles of the 1949 Syrian Penal Code, particularly those relating to intentional homicide, torture, unlawful deprivation of liberty and incitement to sectarian violence.
The My Rights Mena report also highlights several significant procedural shortcomings and calls for strengthening fair trial guarantees, protecting judicial independence, and modernizing Syrian legislation. “Any serious path toward accountability in Syria must be accompanied by comprehensive legislative reform that explicitly incorporates international crimes into the Syrian Penal Code and ratifies the key international conventions relating to these crimes,” explains Almoutassim Al Kilani, an international criminal law expert and founder of My Rights Mena.
“A trial to contain victims’ discontent”
The legal framework for transitional justice also remains largely incomplete.
Legal scholar and transitional justice expert Habib Nassar says it is “regrettable that a hearing of such importance sometimes gives the impression of being staged, without it being clear how this trial fits into a broader transitional justice strategy”. According to him, “it is possible that the Syrian authorities initiated the proceedings in haste, primarily to contain victims’ discontent”.
“To avoid any perception of selective justice, it must be clearly demonstrated that there is a strategy for criminal prosecutions regarding all the violations that marked the previous period,” Nassar comments. It should be noted that Najib is Alawite, a minority group to which Assad belongs. “This is reminiscent of the haste observed in certain post-war justice systems, such as in Iraq, where perceptions of selective justice have inevitably fuelled communal tensions,” Nassar continues.
A Transitional Justice Law on Hold
To date, no comprehensive Syrian law on transitional justice has been adopted, and the draft bill announced has still not been made public. Nassar believes that such a bill is unlikely to see the light of day before the formation of the future Syrian Parliament, many seats of which remain vacant. Alkilani suggests that failure to enact this law could serve as “a pretext to undermine the path to transitional justice”.
Several Syrian organizations are, however, trying to develop a legal framework suited to this transitional period. On May 12, 2026, 27 civil society organizations signed a document entitled “Pathways to Criminal Accountability in Syria”. This is the result of eight months of consultations bringing together Syrian and international experts, civil society organizations, victims, survivors’ associations, and representatives of the commissions responsible for transitional justice and the disappeared. This text proposes a roadmap for establishing “credible and inclusive” mechanisms.
“Few countries in transition have had a civil society as sophisticated and experienced as Syria’s, nor three international mechanisms dedicated to its situation,” Nassar notes. He believes that Syrian authorities and the judiciary should seek the support of civil society and ensure its full participation in any justice process, while benefiting from the assistance of United Nations mechanisms like the International, Impartial, and Independent Mechanism on Syria.
A transitional justice model in the making
But instead, legal ambiguity fuels confusion among Syrians, some of whom believe that the Transitional Justice Commission could conduct trials.
We should abandon the idea that the Syrian authorities are following any structured model of transitional justice, Nassar argues. “The role of the National Commission for Transitional Justice in criminal prosecutions remains undefined to this day, as neither its rules of procedure nor the transitional justice law—supposedly under development—have yet been adopted,” he says. “The question of its future role and its relationship with the criminal justice system therefore remains entirely open. For the moment, we are dealing with measures taken on an ad hoc basis that are difficult to fit into a genuine framework or model of transitional justice, as such a framework does not yet exist at this stage.”
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