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Patrick Kroker: “They saw injuries nobody could have survived”
In Berlin, a former militia member from Syria is accused of war crimes for firing a grenade into a group of civilians in Damascus in 2014. The trial is the third in Germany to prosecute crimes of the...
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Syria: Berlin prosecutors urge life sentence in war crimes trial
In a German court, a former militiaman from Syria is accused of firing a grenade into a crowd of civilians gathered to collect food, in March 2014. The attack took place during a Bashar al-Assad...
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Syrian war crime trial in Berlin: a late alibi for defense
Last Thursday, 16 February, in Berlin, Germany, Palestinian Syrian militiaman Moafak D.’s defense gave their final statements and called for his acquittal. They argued their client had been injured...
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Has universal jurisdiction come of age?
“It seems like every week, across a variety of situations, there’s a new universal jurisdiction case. We used to count case by case to see how this phenomenon was growing. Now we wonder whether it’s a...
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Enforced disappearances and the German contradiction
Last June, Germany was among 83 states supporting the creation of a UN body on missing persons in Syria. And yet it does not itself have the crime of enforced disappearance in its national criminal...
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A stroll into Germany’s conflicted postcolonial memory
Berlin still has a monument commemorating German soldiers who died as “heroes” during the Namibian campaign, which resulted in the genocide of the Herero and Nama about 120 years ago. This tombstone...
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“Bai Lowe tried to make amends for something beyond repair”
The trial for crimes against humanity of Gambian Bai Lowe in Celle, Germany, is about to end. On the 16th and 17th of November, the prosecution and joint plaintiffs gave their closing statements. As a...
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“Someone had to sacrifice themselves”
Last Friday, a week before the verdict, the court in Celle heard the closing arguments of the defense and a final statement by Gambian defendant Bai Lowe. Both insisted on Lowe’s innocence and...
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Trial and error: Germany reforms its law on international crimes
Through the use of universal jurisdiction, German authorities have prosecuted perpetrators of atrocity crimes in Syria, Gambia and Iraq. Now, the German parliament has passed a law to reform the Code...
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The 2013 Tadamon massacre looms over Germany’s latest Syria trial
Videos of the Tadamon massacre of 2013, after being widely circulated on social networks, are being used as evidence in Germany’s latest universal jurisdiction trial. While defendant Ahmed H., a...
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