Will Syria Learn from Global Transitional Justice Experiences?

More than a year and a half after the fall of the Baath regime (8 December 2024), the transitional justice process in Syria still faces major challenges, amid growing demands from victims and human rights organizations to move from promises to practical implementation.

Despite the establishment of bodies concerned with transitional justice and missing persons, observers affirm that the success of this process will be measured by its real ability to uncover the truth, ensure accountability, provide reparations, and reform institutions—key pillars of the United Nations approach to transitional justice.

The need for such a process is highlighted by the scale of violations witnessed in Syria during more than 14 years of conflict. UN estimates indicate hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, while more than 100,000 people remain missing or forcibly disappeared. Human rights organizations also report more than 181,000 cases of arbitrary detention or enforced disappearance since 2011, in addition to millions of displaced persons and refugees, and thousands of cases of torture and grave human rights violations.

In this context, experts believe Syria does not need to start from scratch, as other countries offer important lessons on how to manage the legacy of violations. First, after 2003, Iraq focused on holding former Baath regime figures accountable through the Iraqi High Tribunal and the “de-Baathification” policy. However, many researchers and the United Nations noted that the absence of national reconciliation and comprehensive institutional reform deepened political and sectarian divisions, making justice appear selective to segments of society and affecting stability in the following years.

Similarly, in Tunisia after the 2011 revolution, the Truth and Dignity Commission was established, investigating more than 62,000 human rights violation cases between 1955 and 2013. It held public hearings and recommended reforms and compensation for victims. However, the failure to implement its recommendations and political disputes limited the impact of the experience, making it an example that establishing institutions alone is not enough without political will to complete the process.

In Morocco, the state chose a different path by establishing the Equity and Reconciliation Commission in 2004, which investigated violations during the “Years of Lead.” It heard thousands of victims and recommended compensation and legal and institutional reforms, becoming the first experience of its kind in the Arab world to officially acknowledge violations and provide reparations.

Also in South Africa, after the end of apartheid in 1994, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 1995 and began its work the following year. It heard thousands of victims and perpetrators, linking truth-telling with the possibility of conditional amnesty for those who fully confessed, which helped reduce tendencies toward revenge and supported the transition to a democratic system.

Meanwhile, Rwanda, which witnessed a genocide in 1994 that claimed around 800,000 lives in nearly one hundred days, adopted, alongside international courts, local “Gacaca” courts that handled nearly two million cases. These contributed to accelerating accountability and reintegrating society, despite ongoing debate over certain aspects of the experience.

As for Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite the prosecution of dozens of war criminals before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and local courts, the continued political divisions and disputes over historical narratives have shown that courts alone are not sufficient to achieve sustainable reconciliation if not accompanied by institutional and societal reforms.

The experiences of Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina reveal that limiting transitional justice to certain components and basics without completing the full process can reduce its impact. While they contributed to acknowledging violations or holding some officials accountable, they did not end societal divisions or achieve lasting reconciliation. This highlights the importance of combining accountability, reparations, and institutional reform to ensure long-term stability.

In contrast, the experiences of South Africa and Rwanda show that transitional justice can help ease divisions and rebuild trust within society when it is linked to truth-seeking, accountability, and the involvement of victims in the justice process, despite ongoing debates in both countries regarding the limits of amnesty and trial guarantees.

The United Nations consistently emphasizes in its statements on these experiences that, despite their differences, they share one fundamental reality: there is no single model for transitional justice. Instead, there are general principles that must be adapted to the circumstances of each country, while preserving its core pillars—truth-seeking, accountability, reparations, institutional reform, and victim participation in shaping the process.

Human rights advocates argue that ignoring these lessons could lead Syria to reproduce the causes of conflict, as the absence of accountability, or its selective application, failure to uncover the fate of missing persons, or delays in institutional reform could entrench distrust between society and the state, fuel divisions, and threaten long-term stability.

Conversely, they stress that benefiting from international experiences does not mean copying them, but rather building a Syrian model grounded in international standards while taking into account the country’s social diversity and particularities, in order to achieve comprehensive justice for all victims without discrimination.

ANHA