“The prosecution portrays my client as the all-powerful boss, but he was not,“ countered Khaled al-H.’s defence attorney.
“Bad things happened” at the notorious Syrian investigative commission, but his client was not a member of the commission, the defence attorney claimed.
In his closing statement, Mussab Abou R.’s defence attorney focused on the charge of sexual coercion, since a conviction on that count carries a harsher sentence.
The defence attorney explained that while it had been “a terrible act of violence, it was not a sexual offense.”
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“The victims will suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives. There will never be justice for this. But as victims, they have the chance to achieve a measure of justice by at least holding the perpetrators accountable,” said a representative of the Vienna-based non-profit organisation the Centre for the Enforcement of Human Rights International (CEHRI), which represented 18 of the victims, after the verdict was handed down.
In the world’s first trial concerning state-sponsored torture in Syria, a court in Germany sentenced a former employee of the Syrian intelligence service to life in prison in early 2022 for crimes against humanity, 27 counts of murder, torture and other offenses.
In Sweden, a former Syrian soldier was convicted of war crimes in 2017.
In Syria itself, a high-ranking former officer is on trial for the first time since May.
