2014 Syrian Detainee Report
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The 2014 Syrian detainee report, also known as the Caesar Report, formally titled A Report into the credibility of certain evidence with regard to Torture and Execution of Persons Incarcerated by the current Syrian regime, is a report that claims to detail "the systematic killing of more than 11,000 detainees by the Syrian government in one region during the Syrian Civil War over a two and half year period from March 2011 to August 2013". It was released on 21 January 2014, a day before talks were due to begin at the
Geneva II Conference on Syria The Geneva II Conference on Syria (also called Geneva II Middle East peace conference or simply Geneva IIUN News Center. ''Preparations for upcoming Syria peace conference 'on track,’ says UN chief''. "The goal of the so-called "Geneva II" ...
, and was commissioned by the
government of Qatar The political system of Qatar is a semi-constitutional monarchy with the emir as head of state and chief executive, and the prime minister as the head of government. Under the Constitution of Qatar, the partially-elected Consultative Assemb ...
. Qatar has been a key funder of the rebels in Syria. The Syrian government questioned the report due to its ties to hostile sides against the Syrian government and pointed to how many of the photos were identified as casualties among international terrorists fighting the Syrian government or Syrian army troops or civilians massacred by them due to supporting the Syrian government.
Human Rights Watch Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human r ...
(HRW) concluded after a six month investigation that the photographic evidence in the report was genuine. The ensuing HRW report based on the Caesar Report was titled, ''If the Dead Could Speak''. This report published on 16 December 2015 said that Syrian officials should be tried for
crimes against humanity Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic acts committed by or on behalf of a ''de facto'' authority, usually a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity do not have to take place within the ...
.Bashar al-Assad’s crimes against humanity, caught on camera: A trove of pictures of atrocious abuse is pronounced genuine
economist.com.
The Caesar Report led to U.S. sanctions on Syria under the
Global Magnitsky Act The Magnitsky Act, formally known as the Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, is a bipartisan bill passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in D ...
in 2012, and under the
Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019, also known as the Caesar Act, is United States legislation that sanctions the Syrian government, including Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, for war crimes against the Syrian population. The A ...
in 2020. The Caesar Act was passed under the
U.S. Senate The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber. Together they compose the national bicameral legislature of the United States. The composition and powe ...
National Defense Authorization Act The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the name for each of a series of United States federal laws specifying the annual budget and expenditures of the U.S. Department of Defense. The first NDAA was passed in 1961. The U.S. Congress o ...
for Fiscal Year 2020 (S. 1709) through a committee report by the
U.S. House of Representatives The United States House of Representatives, often referred to as the House of Representatives, the U.S. House, or simply the House, is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper chamber. Together they ...


Source of evidence

The source, who for security reasons is identified only as Caesar, was at the time a photographer with the Syrian military police who worked secretly with a Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Movement. His job was "taking pictures of killed detainees" at just two military hospitals in
Damascus )), is an adjective which means "spacious". , motto = , image_flag = Flag of Damascus.svg , image_seal = Emblem of Damascus.svg , seal_type = Seal , map_caption = , ...
. He told war crimes investigators that he used to be a forensic investigator. But once the Syrian uprising began, his job became documenting the corpses of those killed in Syrian military prisons. He did not claim to have witnessed
execution Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the State (polity), state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to ...
s or torture. But he did describe a highly bureaucratic system. The bodies would then be buried in rural areas. He began making duplicates of his photo evidence in September 2011 and sending them on thumb drives to a relative who fled Syria and was working with human rights groups. After sharing thousands of images, he feared for his safety and was smuggled out of the country in August 2013. The authors of the report who interviewed him found him credible and truthful and his account "most compelling" after subjecting it to "rigorous scrutiny".


Authors

The authors of the report are: *Sir
Desmond Lorenz de Silva Sir George Desmond Lorenz de Silva, (13 December 1939 – 2 June 2018) was a British criminal law barrister and international lawyer who served as the United Nations Chief War Crimes Prosecutor in Sierra Leone. Early life Desmond de Silva was ...
QC, former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone. *Sir
Geoffrey Nice Sir Geoffrey Nice KC (born 21 October 1945) is a British barrister and judge. He took part in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and was lead prosecutor at Slobodan Milošević's trial. He is chair of the China Tribu ...
QC, former lead prosecutor of former Yugoslavian president
Slobodan Milosevic Slobodan ( sr-Cyrl, Слободан) is a Serbo-Croatian masculine given name which means "free" (''sloboda'' / meaning "freedom, liberty") used among other South Slavs as well. It was coined by Serbian liberal politician Vladimir Jovanović w ...
. *Professor David Crane, who indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia at the Sierra Leone court. Also involved in the report were three experienced forensic science experts, including evidence from a forensic pathologist, an anthropologist who investigated mass graves in
Kosovo Kosovo ( sq, Kosova or ; sr-Cyrl, Косово ), officially the Republic of Kosovo ( sq, Republika e Kosovës, links=no; sr, Република Косово, Republika Kosovo, links=no), is a partially recognised state in Southeast Euro ...
and an expert in digital images who examined and authenticated samples of 55,000 digital images, comprising about 11,000 victims.


Content

The 31-page report, which was commissioned by a leading firm of London solicitors, examined thousands of Syrian government photographs and files recording deaths in the custody of government security forces. Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were
emaciated Emaciation is defined as the state of extreme thinness from absence of body fat and muscle wasting usually resulting from malnutrition. Characteristics In humans, the physical appearance of emaciation includes thinned limbs, pronounced and protrud ...
, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had eyes gouged out and others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution. The report stated: "The reason for photographing executed persons was twofold. First to permit a death certificate to be produced without families requiring to see the body, thereby avoiding the authorities having to give a truthful account of their deaths; second to confirm that orders to execute individuals had been carried out." Families were told that the cause of death was either a "heart attack" or "breathing problems," it added. "The procedure for documentation was that when a detainee was killed each body was given a reference number which related to that branch of the security service responsible for his detention and death. When the corpse was taken to the military hospital it was given a further number so as to document, falsely, that death had occurred in the hospital. Once the bodies were photographed, they were taken for burial in a rural area." The photos were taken on the premises of the 601 Military Hospital in the
Mezzeh Mezzeh ( ar, ٱلْمَزَّة, al-Mazzah, also transcribed as al-Mazzah, el-Mezze, etc.) is a municipality in Damascus, Syria, due west of Kafr Sousa. It lies to the southwest of central Damascus, along the Mezzeh highway (also known as Fayez ...
district of Damascus.


Implications

The report is being made available to the UN, governments and human rights groups. Experts say the evidence is more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that has yet emerged from the Syrian conflict. As a result of the report it has been suggested that Syrian government officials could face war crimes charges in light of the evidence presented within. The inquiry team said it was satisfied there was "clear evidence, capable of being believed by a tribunal of fact in a court of law, of systematic torture and killing of detained persons by the agents of the Syrian government. It would support findings of crimes against humanity and could also support findings of war crimes against the current Syrian regime." De Silva told the Guardian that the evidence "documented industrial-scale killing," and added: "This is a smoking gun of a kind we didn't have before. It makes a very strong case indeed." Crane said: "Now we have direct evidence of what was happening to people who had disappeared. This is the first provable, direct evidence of what has happened to at least 11,000 human beings who have been tortured and executed and apparently disposed of. This is amazing. This is the type of evidence a prosecutor looks for and hopes for. We have pictures, with numbers that marry up with papers with identical numbers – official government documents. We have the person who took those pictures. That's beyond-reasonable-doubt-type evidence." A representative for Bashar Assad denied the images were even taken inside the country. But representatives of the U.S. State Department, British Foreign Secretary, Amnesty International and other bodies said the photographs are irrefutable testimony of widespread human rights abuses that could well rise to the level of war crimes. Due to the report and other findings, the head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria,
Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro (born 8 January 1944) is a Brazilian legal scholar with relevant work within the United Nations System. Career Pinheiro was born in Rio de Janeiro. He has a long career in academia, having held academic positions at the Uni ...
, stated, "The mass scale of deaths of detainees suggests that the Government of Syria is responsible for acts that amount to extermination as a crime against humanity".


Related reports

According to a report by
Amnesty International Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says it has more than ten million members and sup ...
, published in November 2015, the Syrian government has forcibly disappeared more than 65,000 people (who are yet to be heard from) since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. According to a report in May 2016 by the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights , image = Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Logo.jpg , image_size = 200px , caption = The logo of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights , type = NGO , founded_date = , founder ...
, at least 60,000 people have been killed through
torture Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. Some definitions are restricted to acts c ...
or died from dire humanitarian conditions in Syrian government jails since March 2011.Monitor: 60,000 dead in Syria government jails
Al Jazeera


''If the Dead Could Speak''

The HRW report ''If the Dead Could Speak'' corroborated the images and findings in the Caesar Report. Human Rights Watch had released a torture report about the Assad government years before this, titled, "Torture Archipelago."


Caesar Exhibit

The Caesar Exhibit is a high-profile exhibition showing photographic evidence of torture and death committed by the Assad government in Syria's prisons. This exhibit is sponsored by the non-profit organization
Syrian Emergency Task Force The Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) is a United States-based, 501-C(3) organization established in March 2011 to support the Syrian opposition. SETF advocates in solidarity with the Syrian rebels to inform and educate the American public and ...
. The
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust hi ...
, European Parliament, UK Parliament, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the UN have showcased this exhibit.


Koblenz trial

Mostly on the base of the data from the Caesar Report, a universal jurisdiction trial under German law (german: Völkerstrafgesetzbuch) started on 23 April 2020 in the city of
Koblenz Koblenz (; Moselle Franconian language, Moselle Franconian: ''Kowelenz''), spelled Coblenz before 1926, is a German city on the banks of the Rhine and the Moselle, a multi-nation tributary. Koblenz was established as a Roman Empire, Roman mili ...
in Germany. The duration of the trial was estimated as several months. The trial has two defendants, former Syrian security servicemen, a colonel
Anwar Raslan Anwar Raslan (; born 3 February 1963) is a former Syrian colonel who led a unit of Syria's General Intelligence Directorate. In January 2022, he was convicted of crimes against humanity in a German Higher Regional Court under universal jurisdi ...
(57) and his aid, Eyad al-Gharib (43), both were working in the Branch 251 of the Syrian secret service in
Damascus )), is an adjective which means "spacious". , motto = , image_flag = Flag of Damascus.svg , image_seal = Emblem of Damascus.svg , seal_type = Seal , map_caption = , ...
. As stated by prosecution, there was a prison just near the Branch 251 where 4,000 prisoners were tortured from April 2011 to September 2012 under Anwar Raslan's leadership.


Criticism

Assad denies the findings of the Caesar Report. The pro-Assad group, Syria Solidarity Movement (SSM), claimed that reports made by many journalists about conditions of Assad's prisons were biased or false.


See also

*
Americans for a Free Syria Americans for a Free Syria is a nonpartisan American nonprofit organization that campaigns for human rights in Syria and advocates for humane treatment of Syrian refugees. This organization often coordinates with Syrian Emergency Task Force and Syr ...
* ''
For Sama ''For Sama'' () is a 2019 documentary film produced and narrated by Waad Al-Kateab, and directed by Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts. The film focuses on Waad Al-Kateab's journey as a journalist and rebel in the Syrian uprising. Her husband is ...
'' *
Human rights in Syria The situation for human rights in Syria is considered poor by international observers.CNN EXCLUSIVE: Gruesome Syria photos may prove torture by Assad regime
* Garance Le Caisne: ''Operation Caesar: At the Heart of the Syrian Death Machine.'' Polity Press. * * * * * * *


External links


"The Caesar Report" (PDF version)

If the Dead Could Speak: Mass Deaths and Torture in Syria’s Detention Facilities

Official website of Caesar Exhibit

United States Department of Justice: Syrian Arab Republic
{{Syrian civil war 2014 in the Syrian civil war Human rights abuses in Syria Political repression in Syria Prisons in Syria Torture in Syria