In response to Syria’s brutal civil war, the family and officials of ousted president Bashar al-Assad are facing legal action in a number of nations, particularly France and Germany.

Here are some of the cases:

– France –

Assad, his brother Maher and two generals, Ghassan Abbas and Bassam al-Hassan, have been since November 14, 2023, the subjects of international arrest warrants issued by France.

They are accused of conspiring to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity as a result of the August 2013 chemical attacks.

The Paris appeals court’s arrest warrant for Assad was confirmed in June 2024, but prosecutors claimed in July that they had requested that the court’s highest court in France be reviewed in order to determine whether it was legitimate.

Four senior Syrian army officers are alleged to have ordered a 2017 bombardment that claimed the life of a French-Syrian civilian in the southern city of Daraa.

Fahd Jassem al-Freij, Ali Abdullah Ayoub, Ahmed Mohamed Balloul and Ali Safetli are all accused of war crimes.

In a landmark case, a Paris court in May of 2024 upheld the convictions of three top Syrian security officials for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Ali Mamlouk, former head of the National Security Bureau, Jamil Hassan, former director of the Air Force intelligence service, and Abdel Salam Mahmoud, former head of investigations — were all absent, but are sentenced over their role in the torture and disappearance of a French-Syrian father and son in Syria in 2013.

– Germany –

For nearly three years a Syrian military doctor, Alaa Moussa, has been on trial in Frankfurt accused of torture, murder and crimes against humanity in military hospitals.

He arrived in Germany in 2015, and he is facing 18 counts of torture and detention by injection.

In the first international trial involving state-sponsored torture in Syrian prisons, Germany used the principle of universal jurisdiction to convict former Syrian colonel Anwar Raslan of crimes against humanity.

A member of a government militia that was detained in Germany in February 2021 received a life sentence for war crimes and the death of at least four civilians in the Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus in 2014 in Berlin.

– Sweden –

A Syrian former general who lived there was cleared of war crimes charges in Sweden in June 2024, arguing that prosecution had not established his involvement in the army’s “indiscriminate attacks.”

Former brigadier general Mohammed Hamo, 65, was one of the highest-ranking Syrian military officials to stand trial in Europe.

Sweden was the first nation in 2017 to sentence a former Syrian soldier to a war crime sentence.

– Switzerland –

Rifaat al-Assad, the attorney general of Assad’s uncle, was charged in March 2024 by the attorney general of Switzerland for allegedly committing war crimes and human rights, which he had been given for decades before he was referred to as “The Butcher of Hama.”

A long list of crimes committed in February 1982, during a infamous conflict between the Syrian military and the Islamist opposition in the western Syrian town of Hama, are brought against the former Syrian vice president and former Syrian army officer.

In 1984, he fled into exile after a failed attempt to overthrow his brother Hafez al-Assad.

After 37 years in exile in France, he finally returned home in 2021 after working in opposition to the Syrian regime in Switzerland and later in France.

The date of his trial has not been announced.

– The Hague: first international case –

The International Court of Justice in The Hague ordered Syria to “take all measures within its power to prevent acts of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” in the first international case involving the Syria conflict, which was launched by Canada and the Netherlands in November 2023.