Digital archiving and crowdsourcing of evidence in transitional justice: the case of Syrian human rights trials in Europe

Recently, transitional justice (TJ) scholarship has taken a critical turn regarding the top-down approach of TJ processes. Critics argue that they have been reduced to ready-to-use packages implemented by international judges, legal experts, or big transnational advocacy NGOs (Lefranc & Vairel 2014, Haldemann 2022). Because this standardized approach takes little into account local contexts, TJ processes tend to have limited scope and results. Human rights trials based on the principle of universal jurisdiction have suffered from similar criticism. The selectiveness and lack of universality in prosecution led the International Criminal Court and universal jurisdiction to be criticized as being biased and neocolonial (Abu-Odeh 2007). To remedy this situation, recent human rights and TJ processes have favoured bottom-up participation: the design and implementation of TJ mechanisms with the contribution of victims (Lundy & McGovern 2008, Clark 2010, Gready & Robins 2014). The point is to shift away from a top-down standardized approach led by international experts to include victims and local actors. This paper proposes to explore the bottom-up and activist dimension of TJ processes using the vantage point of Syrian human rights trials in Europe. On 13 January 2022, the High Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany, found the former Syrian colonel Anwar Raslan guilty of crimes against humanity. The court acted upon the principle of universal jurisdiction while the prosecution relied on a network of Syrian Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to gather evidence and witnesses. Raslan’s sentence is therefore a rare success: prospects for justice and accountability are low for victims of the Syrian regime as Syria is not party to the ICC. Since then, new complaints against former officers of the Assad regime have been filed in Germany, France and Norway. This paper focuses on Syrian CSOs’ efforts to document crimes for the trials, such as the ‘Caesar files’ on the torture of thousands of civilians in Syrian detention centers. Based on the cross-examination of three European trials, the paper highlights similitudes and differences across Syrian CSOs involved in gathering evidence of human rights violations. Specifically, it focuses on innovative documentation methods, such as digital archiving and crowdsourcing of evidence through social media. This paper will contribute to this Section by providing insight into new ways of knowing and doing transitional justice and human rights from the perspective of local actors. Specifically, it will probe the impact of innovative and unconventional archiving practices for the documentation of human rights abuses, and it will feed into reflections on the emergence of indigenous knowledge systems and practices.