Ordinary Courts, Informal Justice Efforts and Accountability for Massive Human Rights Violations in Syria: An Empirical Analysis of How the Al-Khatib Trial and Dabbagh Case Contribute to a Dense Accountability Matrix

Accountability mechanisms are often coined as the Achilles’ heel of human rights practice. Especially in contexts of armed conflict or authoritarianism, classic human rights bodies and justice institutions rarely provide adequate accountability guarantees. As a result, a range of justice actors increasingly turn to alternative spaces to further accountability for human rights violations. This paper explores how this shift manifests in the Syrian context, where various justice actors engage in a wide range of both judicial and non-judicial accountability initiatives. These include extraterritorial jurisdiction cases in third states, often before ordinary courts at the sub-national level, as well as informal accountability initiatives developed in the orbit of criminal proceedings. This paper is grounded in an empirical analysis of the al-Khatib trial at the Koblenz Regional Court, the first trial addressing Syrian state torture, and the Dabbagh case at the Paris Criminal Court, which prosecuted high-ranking Syrian state officials in absentia. These cases serve as key examples of the role criminal proceedings can play in the struggle for human rights accountability during ongoing conflicts. The paper also examines civil society initiatives and artistic practices connected to these cases. While it underlines that non-judicial spaces cannot replace the accountability provided by domestic or international proceedings, it also underlines the need to better understand their contribution to the struggle for thick accountability. The paper proposes the notion of an accountability matrix as an analytical framework that invites for the acknowledgement, analysis and theorization of oft-overlooked spaces and processes for seeking accountability, and for scrutinizing how they interact in struggles for thick accountability.