Looking for missing people in Syria: can a new UN body help?

A Syrian refugee holds up an image of his missing wife. At least 100,000 people have gone missing since the start of the war in Syria. Keystone / Yannis Kolesidis

International Geneva may soon get another United Nations institution, after the UN General Assembly voted on June 29 to create a body on missing people in Syria. Civil society helped push for this move, but some doubt it will have any real effect.

At least 100,000 people have gone missing in Syria since the start of the civil war in 2011, and the real figure is probably much higher. Even if someone is presumed dead, their families have no closure and cannot grieve.

Yasmen Almashan is one of the people still looking for family members. She is communication manager of the Berlin-based Caesar Families AssociationExternal link, a group of families pushing for truth and justice about their loved ones forcibly disappeared in Syria. It is named after the so-called Caesar filesExternal link, a collection of tens of thousands of photos leaked from Syrian regime detention centres showing victims of torture.

“I lost five brothers in the Syrian revolutionary movement that turned into war,” Almashan told SWI swissinfo.ch from southern Germany. “Two of them were disappeared – one by the Assad regime, and I found his photo among the Caesar photos. The other one was kidnapped by Daesh [Islamic State] when they attacked my city Deir ez-Zor in 2014. Since then I have no information about him.”

She says the other three brothers were killed by snipers while taking part in an anti-government demonstration in 2012.

+ Read more about Swiss efforts to trace missing persons

Syrian civil society initiative

The Caesar Families Association is one of the Syrian groups of victims and their families (signatories to the “Truth and Justice CharterExternal link”) that pushed for the UN resolution, supported by international NGOs such as Impunity Watch, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Federation for Human Rights. Almashan says civil society groups have been working on the idea for some three years, including lobbying for political support.

The resolution was adoptedExternal link by the General Assembly with 83 states in favour, 11 against and 62 abstentions. The Syrian government voted against, saying it was a “bizarre mechanism that has no terms of reference and will be used as a cover tool to exert more pressure on Syria”. The Syrian representative also said his government had not been consulted.

The resolution sets up an “Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria”, which it said should “ensure participation and representation of victims, survivors and the missing persons’ families, including women’s organisations and civil society, and shall apply a victim- and survivor-centred approach”. It calls on the UN secretary-general, with support from the UN human rights office in Geneva, “to develop, within 80 working days of the resolution’s adoption, the Independent Institution’s terms of reference and take steps necessary to establish this Institution”. 

The Security Council, which is the UN’s supreme body, has since the start of the ongoing Syrian conflict been blocked by the Russian veto from taking any strong action to stop the war or bring suspected war criminals to justice, such as referring the situation to the International Criminal Court. However, it did establish a Geneva-based “mechanism”, the IIIM, to collect and preserve evidence for possible use in future trials.

The IIIM has been working since 2016. Established by a UN resolution that same year, it has a mandate to “assist in the investigation and prosecution of persons responsible for the most serious crimes” in Syria committed since March 2011. This “mechanism” may have shared some of its evidence with national prosecutors, as there have been some Syria cases under the principle of “universal jurisdiction”, notably in GermanyExternal link. However, the results of its work are not very visible.

The representative of Luxembourg, which introduced the General Assembly resolution, told the UN body that “the new Independent Institution will reinforce complementarity and avoid duplication, while ensuring coordination and communication with all relevant actors of the ongoing initiative”.

In a statementExternal link the following day, IIIM president Catherine Marchi-Uhel of France welcomed the new body on missing people. She called it a breakthrough and said the IIIM was ready to cooperate with it.

Breakthrough or face-saving move?

However, it seems legitimate to ask why we need another UN bodyExternal link. Almashan of Caesar Families says the new body is a “humanitarian” initiative with civil society participation. It is based on victims’ families’ right to know the truth about their loved ones, focused on searching for missing people in Syria with active participation of victims and their families. The IIIM, on the other hand, is focused on accountability through criminal justice, she told SWI swissinfo.ch.

But Anwar al-Bunni, a Syrian human rights lawyer who has worked on Syria cases in Germany, is much more sceptical. “The main motive behind this measure is saving face with regard to their [the UN’s] grave negligence on the suffering of the Syrian people,” he told SWI swissinfo.ch. “It’s simply an attempt to make believe that they are doing something, whereas in reality they are doing nothing. It’s an attempt to gain time faced with the complexity of the situation and their paralysis due to the Russian veto.”

He doesn’t think the Syrian government or any of the parties in Syria will cooperate, so the new body will be hamstrung. Nor will it have a deterrent effect, according to him. “The regime’s biggest weapon is arrests, torture and forced disappearance. If the regime stops arresting people, it won’t last a minute.”

“This mechanism will not achieve any results,” Al-Bunni continues. “Just like the international mechanism for evidence-gathering, which has gathered evidence, but what has it done with that?”

The only thing the new body might do, he thinks, is raise international awareness on the issue of prisoners and enforced disappeared people in Syria. It could also serve as a reference on statistics and names of all these people for future investigations, if a political solution to the Syria crisis emerges.

Fadel Abdul Ghani, president of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, also hopes the new body will “keep the issue of detainees and disappeared people on the table in any future political talks”. And, he says, it will keep the UN Security Council regularly informed on the issue, keeping it on the international agenda.

“This mechanism is not expected to enable the release of prisoners or find the disappeared, especially if the regime and other human rights violators in Syria refuse to deal with it,” he told SWI swissinfo.ch, “because cooperating with it means acknowledgment of the existence of the disappeared and detainees, which constitutes a condemnation of that.”

Almashan also doubts the Syrian government will cooperate. “We know the regime, and we know it will not accept,” she said. “But things change every day in politics. Maybe today they refuse but tomorrow they will accept. Perhaps the regime will change and a transitional government will come in that will cooperate.”  

What next?

UN and Syrian civil society sources told SWI swissinfo.ch that the location of the new body was still under discussion. However,  UN other sources said Geneva seemed a likely option, particularly for purposes of coordination with other bodies. The IIIM is based in Geneva, as are the Human Rights Council-mandated Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic and the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Syria.

According to Anne Massagee, who works from Beirut for the UN human rights office (OCHCR), “the Secretary-General, with the support of OHCHR, is tasked with developing the terms of reference for the Institution within 80 working days, and we are in the middle of that process”. She says the target is for the new body to be operational as of April 1.

As for coordination, Massagee told SWI swissinfo.ch that it will have to be worked out by the incoming head of the new institution on missing people in Syria.

Edited by Virginie Mangin