Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic criminal acts which are committed by or on behalf of a de facto authority, usually by or on behalf of a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war. They are not isolated or sporadic events because they are part of a government policy or they are part of a widespread practice of atrocities which is tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority. They do not need to be part of an official policy, but they only need to be tolerated by authorities.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is a US-based not-for-profit human rights NGO that uses medicine and science to document and advocate against mass atrocities and severe human rights violations around the world. PHR headquarters are in New York City, with offices in Boston, Washington, D.C., as well as Nairobi. It was established in 1986 to use the unique skills and credibility of health professionals to advocate for persecuted health workers, prevent torture, document mass atrocities, and hold those who violate human rights accountable.
International criminal law (ICL) is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetration. The core crimes under international law are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.
The situation for human rights in Syria is considered one of the worst in the world and has been globally condemned by international organizations like the United Nations, Human rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the European Union. Civil liberties, political rights, freedom of speech and assembly are virtually non-existent under the Ba'athist government of Bashar al-Assad; which is regarded as "one of the world's most repressive regimes". The 50th edition of Freedom in the World, the annual report published by Freedom House since 1973, designates Syria as "Worst of the Worst" among the "Not Free" countries. The report lists Syria as one of the two countries to get the lowest possible score (1/100).
Transitional justice is a process which responds to human rights violations through judicial redress, political reforms in a region or country, and other measures in order to prevent the recurrence of human rights abuse. Transitional justice consists of judicial and non-judicial measures implemented in order to redress legacies of human rights abuses. Such mechanisms "include criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programs, and various kinds of institutional reforms" as well as memorials, apologies, and various art forms. Transitional justice is instituted at a point of political transition classically from war to positive peace, or more broadly from violence and repression to societal stability and it is informed by a society's desire to rebuild social trust, reestablish what is right from what is wrong, repair a fractured justice system, and build a democratic system of governance. The core value of transitional justice is the very notion of justice—which does not necessarily mean criminal justice. This notion and the political transformation, such as regime change or transition from conflict are thus linked to a more peaceful, certain, and democratic future.
An amnesty law is any legislative, constitutional or executive arrangement that retroactively exempts a select group of people, usually military leaders and government leaders, from criminal liability for the crimes that they committed. More specifically, in the 'age of accountability', amnesty laws have come to be considered as granting impunity for the violation of human rights, including institutional measures that preclude the prosecution for such crimes and reprieve those crimes already convicted, avoiding any form of accountability.
Stephen J. Rapp is an American lawyer and the former United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice.
The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) is a US non-profit international human rights organization based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1998, CJA represents survivors of torture and other grave human rights abuses in cases against individual rights violators before U.S. and Spanish courts. CJA has pioneered the use of civil litigation in the United States as a means of redress for survivors from around the world.
The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world. It was founded in 1991 by Patrick Ball. The organization has published findings on conflicts in Syria, Colombia, Chad, Kosovo, Guatemala, Peru, East Timor, India, Liberia, Bangladesh, and Sierra Leone. The organization provided testimony in the war crimes trials of Slobodan Milošević and Milan Milutinović at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and in Guatemala's Supreme Court in the trial of General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the de facto president of Guatemala in 1982-1983. Gen. Ríos was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. Most recently, the organization has published on police violence in the United States.
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) is an independent, nonprofit non-governmental organization with the aim of enforcing human rights through legal means. Using litigation, it tries to hold state and non-state actors responsible human rights violations. It was founded in 2007 by the German civil rights attorney Wolfgang Kaleck together with a group of human rights lawyers, in order to help protect the rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as other declarations of human rights and national constitutions, by juridical means. ECCHR engages in litigation, using European, international, and national law to help protect human rights.
Human rights violations during the Syrian civil war have been numerous and serious, with United Nations reports stating that the war has been "characterized by a complete lack of adherence to the norms of international law" by the warring parties who have "caused civilians immeasurable suffering". For a relatively small number of these war crimes, prosecution of Syrian civil war criminals has resulted.
The Violations Documentation Center in Syria is a network of Syrian opposition activists whose aim is to document human rights violations perpetrated since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, including victims of the violence, detainees, and missing people. The organization works with the activists from the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, and documents identified victims of the violence from the rebels and the civilians. The stated purpose of the organization is to provide an independent documentation of human rights violations within Syria, a resource that may help any future justice-related procedures. The center's main sources of information include medical records, families of the victims and information received from the Imam of the mosque that performed the burial.
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, and was commissioned by the government of Qatar. 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.
International and national courts outside Syria have begun the prosecution of Syrian civil war criminals. War crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government or rebel groups include extermination, murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture and imprisonment. "[A]ccountability for serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights is central to achieving and maintaining durable peace in Syria", stated UN Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo.
The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is a national human rights institution (NHRI) established by the Ethiopian government. The EHRC is charged with promoting human rights and investigating human rights abuses in Ethiopia. The EHRC states organizational independence as one of its values. In October 2021, the EHRC's rating by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions for operation in accordance with the UN Paris Principles was upgraded from grade B to grade A.
Anwar Raslan is a Syrian former 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 jurisdiction. The specific charges against him were 4,000 counts of torture, 58 counts of murder, rape, and sexual coercion. His case was the first international war crimes case against a member of the Syrian government during the presidency of Bashar al-Assad.
The EHRC–OHCHR Tigray investigation is a human rights investigation launched jointly by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in mid-2021 into human rights violations of the Tigray War that started in November 2020. The EHRC–OHCHR joint investigation team's report was published on 3 November 2021.
Pushback is a term that refers to "a set of state measures by which refugees and migrants are forced back over a border – generally immediately after they crossed it – without consideration of their individual circumstances and without any possibility to apply for asylum". Pushbacks violate the prohibition of collective expulsion of aliens in Protocol 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights and often violate the international law prohibition on non-refoulement.
Libya Crimes Watch (LCW) is a non-governmental, non-profit human rights organization established in 2019 at the initiative of independent human rights activists, registered in the United Kingdom, and mainly specialized in monitoring and documenting crimes and all Human Rights Violations in Libya, and aims to spread a culture of human rights and work to bring criminals to justice.
The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) was established by the UN Human Rights Council in December 2021. The mandate of the commission is to investigate allegations of violations and abuses of international human rights law, humanitarian law and refugee law in Ethiopia committed since 3 November 2020 by all parties to the conflict. The Commission comprises three human rights experts and is appointed for a renewable one-year term. In October 2022 at the Human Rights Council's 51st session, the Commission's mandate was extended to December 2023.
