PARIS: Prosecutors said Tuesday they had asked France’s highest court to review the legality of a French arrest warrant for Syrian President Bashar Assad over deadly chemical attacks on Syrian soil in 2013.
Syrian opposition say one of those attacks in August 2013 on the rebel-held suburbs of Damascus killed around 1,400 people, including more than 400 children, in one of the many horrors of the 13-year civil war.
Prosecutors said they had made the request to the Court of Cassation on Friday on judicial grounds, two days after an appeals court upheld the arrest order.
“This decision is by no means political. It is about having a legal question resolved,” the prosecutors told AFP.
France is believed to have been the first country to issue an arrest warrant for a sitting foreign head of state in November.
Investigative magistrates specialized in so-called crimes against humanity, issued the warrant after several rights groups filed a complaint against Assad for his role in the chain of command for the alleged chemical attacks in the capital’s suburbs on August 4, 5 and 21, 2013.
But prosecutors from a unit specialized in investigating “terrorist” attacks have sought to annul it, although they do not question the grounds for such an arrest.
They argue that immunity for foreign heads of state should only be lifted for international prosecutions, such as at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), lawyers’ association Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) and the Syrian Archive, an organization documenting human rights violations in Syria, filed the initial complaint.
SCM head Mazen Darwish was indignant.
“We view (the) filing of the appeal as a political maneuver aimed at protecting dictators and war criminals,” he told AFP.
Lawyers Jeanne Sulzer and Clemence Witt, who are representing the plaintiffs, said the appeal to the Court of Cassation “again threatens the efforts of victims to have Bashar Assad judged in an independent jurisdiction.”
A UN report on the August 21 attacks said there was clear evidence sarin gas was used in Moadamiyet Al-Sham as well as Zamalka and Ein Tarma in the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus.
Syria’s civil war has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions since it broke out in March 2011 with the Damascus authorities’ brutal repression of anti-government protests.
France’s top court to examine arrest warrant for Syria’s Assad
https://arab.news/ngct9
France’s top court to examine arrest warrant for Syria’s Assad
- France is believed to have been the first country to issue an arrest warrant for a sitting foreign head of state in November
Top entertainment figures back under-fire UN Palestinians expert
PARIS: Over a hundred top figures from the world of entertainment signed an open letter Saturday in support of UN Palestinian human rights expert Francesca Albanese who faces calls to resign over comments about the war in Gaza.
France and Germany have called for Albanese to step down over remarks last weekend in which she referred to a “common enemy of humanity” after criticizing “most of the world” and the media for enabling Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.
Critics and Israel have accused the UN Special Rapporteur of referring to Israel as a “common enemy,” while Albanese has denounced this as a “manipulation” and “completely false.”
In a letter organized by the Artists for Palestine group and shared with AFP, over a 100 cultural figures backed her, including actors Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem, Nobel-winning author Annie Ernaux and British musician Annie Lennox.
The signatories “offer our full support to Francesca Albanese, a defender of human rights and therefore also of the Palestinian people’s right to exist,” the letter says.
“There are infinitely more of us, in every corner of the Earth, who want force no longer to be the law. Who know what the word ‘law’ truly means,” it concludes.
Published in French on the website of Artists for Palestine, it also reproduces the full remarks by Albanese who was speaking via videoconference at a forum last Saturday organized by the Al Jazeera TV network.
Other celebrities to offer support for her include actresses Rosa Salazar and Asia Argento, Oscar-nominated film directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Kaouther Ben Hania, Latin music star Residente, and photographer Nan Goldin.
A group of French MPs sent a letter to French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Tuesday denouncing Albanese’s remarks as “antisemitic.”
Barrot called for her to step down a day later, saying that France “unreservedly condemns the outrageous and reprehensible remarks.”
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul on Thursday said her position was “untenable.”
‘Shame of our time’
Albanese is one of the most outspoken critics of Israel’s more-than-two-year bombardment of Gaza which has resulted in the deaths of over 70,000 people and the destruction of most of the territory’s infrastructure.
She has called it the “the shame of our time” and says she always asks prime ministers, presidents and foreign ministers the same question: “How do you sleep? When will you act?“
The Italian-born legal expert, who began her unpaid role in 2022, was targeted with sanctions by the Trump administration in July last year over what it called her “biased and malicious” work.
UN special rapporteurs like Albanese are independent experts who are appointed by the UN rights council, but do not speak on behalf of the United Nations.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres distanced himself from Albanese on Thursday when his spokesman said “we don’t agree with much of what she says.”
“We wouldn’t use the language that she’s using in describing the situation,” his spokesman Stephane Dujarric added.
The Gaza war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people.
On that day, militants abducted 251 people into Gaza.
The open letter and signatories can be seen here.
