W*****B
发帖数: 4796 | 1 这次是真的铁证如山了，想抵赖也赖不掉了。是真的！虽然之前西方媒体也是这样说的
好多次了。不知道这次是不是也是跟以前一样。
Vault protects smuggled photos documenting alleged Syrian war crimes
In a drab office building in a European capital amid the sound of humming
document scanners, a team of human rights lawyers is hard at work processing
thousands of documents that they say link the Syrian government to war
crimes.
The papers point to an unmistakable conclusion, according to those leading
the effort: The government of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has
violated the international rules of war through attacks on civilians,
torture, rape, and the use of chemical weapons, among other crimes.
“We have stronger evidence than we had for any past conflicts, any past
tribunals, any past international justice efforts,” said Chris Engels,
deputy director of the Commission for International Justice and
Accountability, which has been documenting human rights abuses by Syrian
officials since the start of the civil war in 2011.
According to CIJA adviser Stephen Rapp, the Syrian government meticulously
documented its treatment of thousands of detainees — a product of its large
bureaucracy. As a result, thousands of leaked photos mean prosecutors have
far stronger evidence of war crimes than what existed to convict the Nazis
at Nuremberg, said Rapp, the former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes
issues under President Barack Obama.
The documents amassed so far form a “paper trail of war crimes” noteworthy
for their specificity, according to Engels, who requested NBC News not
reveal the location of the group's office out of concern for
investigators’ safety and the security of the evidence. The documents are
stored in a vault.
The group's 140-person staff is made up of lawyers, investigators, and
translators. That includes more than 40 "document hunters" in Syria
whose mission is to extract material produced by the regime, authorizing the
detention, torture, and execution of people for suspected anti-government
activity.
More on MSNBC’s "On Assignment with Richard Engel" Friday at 9 p.m.
ET
Documents identify who in the regime signed off on what, who was targeted,
and why. In some cases where the documents indicate that a prisoner admitted
to participating in anti-regime activity, CIJA tracked down the accused,
who later said their confessions were extracted through torture.
The organization was founded by Bill Wiley, a Canadian former war crimes
investigator, as news reports began surfacing of widespread abuses by the
Assad regime in 2011. It receives funding from Western countries, including
the British and Canadian governments, to carry out its work.
Added to the trove of documents is vital visual evidence: roughly 50,000
photos shot between the start of the war in 2011 and 2013, cataloging more
than 6,700 victims of torture by pro-regime forces. They were taken by a
forensic photographer known by the pseudonym Caesar who worked for the
Syrian military and smuggled them out of the country on hard drives in 2013.
Assad has disputed the veracity of the photos, but Human Rights Watch called
the images authentic. The New York-based group confirmed the identity of 27
victims in the photos through interview with relatives, while former
prisoners and defectors have corroborated the widespread torture in
government prisons. In a separate analysis, the FBI confirmed a portion of
the photo trove as authentic. So did a U.N. report.
Caesar’s photos show emaciated corpses, many stripped naked, arrayed on the
ground — some with gouged-out eyes, bloodied genitals, and severed fingers
. Many show signs of bruises, burn marks, and gashes covering discolored
skin. While most of the images are too graphic to air or publish, NBC News
has included two below to illustrate the treatment thought to have been
meted out to Syrian detainees.
Other investigators and activists have also collected testimony, images and
videos documenting atrocities committed by all sides during Syria's war,
a U.N. quasi-prosecutorial body has said. The team announced Monday that it
is preparing case files and has engaged with war crimes investigative units
of different countries including in Europe, whose courts can exercise
universal jurisdiction to prosecute.
CIJA’s goal is to prove government officials’ individual criminal
culpability, from the highest echelons in Damascus down to the provincial
level. The Syrian government's formalized command-and-control structure,
as well as its careful record-keeping, make that work easier.
The Syrian government is “process driven,” Engels said. Directives — even
those authorizing torture — were documented “to make sure that everyone
does what they're supposed to be doing.”
CIJA’s work is logistically difficult and comes with significant risks.
Over the course of the war, where rebels seized regime territory, CIJA’s
document hunters entered abandoned government facilities and extracted
material — USBs, computer hard drives, reams of paper — that might contain
evidence of war crimes.
Next they had to safely store the material, and when possible, smuggle it
through checkpoints and out of Syria. Engels says no one directly employed
by CIJA was ever killed in the process, but people who worked closely with
the team were.
Once the documents are ferried out of Syria, the rest of the CIJA team sifts
through them to build cases for future criminal prosecutions.
Despite what CIJA and other investigators consider to be clear and
overwhelming evidence of war crimes by Assad's government, the regime
remains more firmly entrenched than at any other point in the war due in
large part to the support of Russia, Iran and Iran-backed Lebanese militia
Hezbollah.
Now a concern among human rights lawyers pursuing a case against Assad's
government is that victims of the regime will never see officials held to
account.
Criminal prosecutions within an international tribunal seem increasingly
unlikely. For a case to come before the International Criminal Court, it has
to be referred there by the United Nations Security Council. Russia and
China, two of five veto-wielding members on the council, quashed such a move
in 2014.
“They are dead-set against justice,” Rapp said. “They are dead set
against any kind of investigation that's independent.”
So in place of an international tribunal, Engels and Rapp have been focusing
on lower level domestic prosecutions, and are helping authorities issue
arrest warrants and build cases against Syrian government functionaries who
have since left the country for the West. Last year alone, Rapp says he
fielded 400 requests from law enforcement officials in 12 different
countries, including the FBI.
In September, prosecutors in Sweden issued the first war crimes conviction
of a Syrian army soldier who had sought asylum in the country: eight months
in prison for violating personal dignity by posing with his foot on five
corpses in a photo.
Rapp and Engels admit that such small fare is an unsatisfactory answer to
the millions displaced, wounded or left grieving loved ones killed in the
war and who want to see Assad held accountable.
“It won't be as good as in an international court, but that's the
only alternative we have right now,” Rapp said. |
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