 afternoon everyone. It's my great pleasure to welcome our next speaker in the world crimes group research series, Professor Beth Vonsack from Stanford Law School. Beth, thank you very much for accepting our invitation to talk about your last book about Syria and justice. So I'll take less than a minute to introduce Beth. I don't think she needs an introduction. Beth is a Professor of International Human Rights Law at Stanford Law School and the International Criminal Law. But between her academic work, also Beth served as Deputy to the Ambassador at large for war crimes issues in the office of the Global Criminal Justice of the US Department of State under Secretaries Clinton and Kerry. So Beth has a wonderful nuanced personality both of academia and practice and today we're very lucky to discuss with her her last book on Syria and imagining justice about Syria. I'm not going to take more of your time, but you have the floor after Beth's lecture. We will open the Q&A and I'm looking forward to the discussion. Thank you very much for being with us from California. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Maria and thank you everyone for joining me. I really wish I were there in London with you in person, but obviously that's not a possibility at the moment. But I really appreciate your willingness to sit in front of a screen for one more hour today. I just hope that you maybe have a cocktail or a glass of wine or a pint as you would say in hand during this talk and I hope that we can reconvene in person at some point to continue the conversation. So yes, thank you. I'd love to talk to you today about my new book called imagining justice for Syria. This emerged out of my PhD at Leiden and also my work in the State Department where the conflict in Syria was just emerging from sort of, you know, peaceful protests during the so-called Arab Spring into much more of a full-scale conflict internal armed conflict and then eventually I think an international armed conflict to a certain degree. And so I worked during my time in the State Department with a number of governments and other internal interagency offices to try and imagine opportunities to promote justice for the terrible crimes that were being committed. And what I tried to do in this book is to sort of capture a lot of the creative energy that was being demonstrated during that time from justice entrepreneurs all over the world, Syrian activists and investigators, diplomats in the Hague and New York and in capitals and then within our own government here in the United States. And as you know, this has really proven itself to be an acute and some might even say existential challenge to the international community's commitment to the ideals of justice and accountability. And so what I'll do in this talk is talk a little bit about the background and then the different justice options that have been considered, the different models that have been explored, where we've seen some bright spots and then where we might go from here. So if it's all right with everyone, I'm going to share some slides just so you don't have to do nothing but look at me the whole time. So here they are. Great. So as human rights organizations have been documenting now for a decade, virtually every international crime that is known to the international penal code, which as we know is a melange of customary international law and treaty law, have been committed in and around Syria. The Syrian people have witnessed and been subjected to deliberate indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the misuse of conventional, unconventional, improvised weapons systems, industrial grade custodial abuses in a network of formal and informal prisons, unrelenting siege warfare and the denial of humanitarian assistance, sexual violence, including the enslavement of Yazidi sexual women and girls who were trafficked from Iraq and the detention, the sexual torture of men and boys in detention within Syria, the intentional destruction of irreplaceable cultural property, thousands of Syrians remain missing, many of them victims of enforced disappearances, the long standing taboo against the use of chemical weapons have been repeatedly flouted, and the sectarian nature of the violence has raised the specter of genocide against ethno-religious minorities. The violence in the region has contributed to the biggest exodus of refugees since World War II. As we know, the Syrian battle space has been a crowded one, this map is out of date, but it gives you a sense of the reality of the situation. As the revolution unfurled, the regime of President al-Assad was stood accused as the main culprit of these international crimes, but anti-government actors have not escaped censure, and they've also been faulted for committing their own breaches of humanitarian law, notwithstanding trainings in the laws of armed conflicts and a righteous proclamation of principles. That said, any equivalency allegations as between the regime's deprivation and the at least moderate opposition is obviously an artifice. The regime is responsible for the bulk as the commission of inquiry, which I will discuss in a minute, has found. The emergence, however, of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL has really triangulated the violence in a way that has brought it to an even more alarming level of brutality. ISIL also served as a bridge between the conflicts in Syria and neighboring Iraq, given the high degree of conflict spillover between those two areas. Of course, we also have the involvement of Western powers who are on opposite sides of the conflict, but at once adversaries and allies, adversaries as against the regime or vis-à-vis the regime, but both allies against ISIL and the threat that ISIL posed to stability in the region. This has, of course, complicated events on the ground and generated new risks to civilians. Then finally, we have to add Turkey into the mix, particularly once President Trump diminished U.S. troops in the region, and now Turkey occupies chunks of Syria as well, making this essentially an international armed conflict. All told, the conflict has been so destructive and the crime base so massive and the pool of potential defendants so voluminous that existing institutions really have not been able to adequately respond. The crisis in Syria marks the abject failure of the international system of peace and security that was erected in the post-World War II period. The Security Council has been almost entirely, but not entirely, incapacitated by the propensity of Russia to wield its veto against nearly every coercive measure that was considered against the Assad regime, including legal accountability. As a result, other actors, both within and without the Security Council, have endeavored to find inventive ways around this geopolitical impasse. This forced creativity has generated a number of really innovative institutions, legal arguments, and investigative techniques that are aimed at advancing justice and accountability wherever possible, even though the Security Council itself has been essentially foreclosed. So although the political resolve to bring an end to this fractured conflict and to deliver justice to victims has not materialized, there has been within the international community an unprecedented investment in documentation efforts. Indeed, it now stands that the Syrian conflict has been the most well-documented crime base in human history. While, of course, documentation is not an accountability mechanism in and of itself, it is the predicate for any future transitional justice or justice effort that might occur. All of these would be dependent upon accurate and comprehensive documentation of both crime base and linkage information. Multiple organizations are now working in this space, which has created a new challenge around coordination, deconfliction, and then ultimately shared and collective application. So early in the conflict, the Human Rights Council created a commission of inquiry. This has now become almost a standard response to the emergence of serious human rights abuses or repression in conflict. The commission of inquiry has focused usually on crime base evidence, which most commissions of inquiry have done, but there is some indication of it moving more towards linkage evidence. And there is an indication that they have submitted a list of potential perpetrators to the United Nations to be held if and when there is an accountability mechanism. More innovative, however, was the formation of the international impartial independent mechanism coming out of the General Assembly that is devoted to moving the state of the art forward in terms of true prosecutorial investigations with an idea of creating dossiers on potential defendants that then could be shared with national, international, or hybrid institutions that might be according justice. This was the result, interestingly, of the General Assembly flexing its muscles in the face of debility at the Security Council. In addition, there have been several fact-finding missions and investigative bodies that have emerged out of the OPCW, the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons, tracking the use of chemical weapons, and also apportioning responsibility to the various parties. The OPCW members have essentially expanded the charter of the organization in order to allow it to take this proto-accountability function. Turning to the non-governmental realm, there are dozens of organizations, Syrian, hybrid, international, who are adding to this massive cache of evidence. One new civil society documentation model that's worth highlighting is the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, SEJA, which is a private investigative team that has been capacitated by national states to produce, to collect information in situ with Syrian investigators, and to produce dossiers on potential perpetrators, and also sort of analytical briefs that are going to undergird any charges that might be brought. So dealing with conflict classification, for example, the existence of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, these are the chapeau elements of international crimes that any national prosecution, assuming they're invoking international crimes, would need to prove. And so by virtue of this being done by SEJA, it would move those prosecutions forward a step to then be able to focus on the individual perpetrators. The situation in Syria has also coincided with the explosion of social media and the ubiquity of smartphones capable of capturing the commission of international crimes from multiple perspectives from multiple perspectives from the grassroots. Citizen journalists have uploaded millions of digital images and thousands and thousands of hours of footage of the carnage. This ability of ordinary people to contemporaneously record the commission of war crimes, which has all potential evidence on their phones, has created both incredible opportunities, but also really intractable challenges to accountability, given that we now have a surfeit of unverified and often unverifiable information. Indeed, Google has estimated there are more hours of the Syrian conflict uploaded on to the web than there are actually hours of the conflict and the conflict's been going on for 10 years. So that's saying something. Because the Syrian revolution has played out on social media, new technological tools have been and are being developed to capture, authenticate, deduplicate the millions of images that are available on the internet. And most intriguing is the possibility that some of this information might operate as a substitute to witness testimony. In other words, if we could have this be self authenticating, we could potentially obviate the need to bring witnesses to testify. And as anyone in this field knows, witnesses are the soft underbelly of the system of international justice. They are the vulnerability was we've seen in the ICC with witness tampering, etc. And so if we can find ways to self authenticate this information, it could really move the state of the art forward. So the formation of the triple I am coming out of the General Assembly, Sija, which is a non state actor, but being funded by state actors, both carrying out normally statist functions reveal that sovereign states are no longer enjoying a monopoly on these criminal justice processes. And these developments also reveal a striking willingness of states to outsource this work, these aspects of the prosecutorial process, and work in partnership with both non governmental and multilateral institutions in the quest for justice. So the remainder of this talk, I'll just kind of linger in this little weird slide, which this is how my brain works. I'm not sure everybody's brain works this way. But the idea was to create a sort of matrix of accountability options. And the matrix is has information on a couple of different axes. So first, we have, you know, domestic international or hybrid, what is the level at which a court might be looking at this crime base and according individual or state responsibility. And then second, we have the nature of the respondent. I have here individual, I probably should change that and put non state actors because the idea is essentially individuals, but also potential corporate defendants. And we can get into that later if people are interested. And the alternative, we have the state as a potential perpetrator and respondent in international proceedings. Of course, we know there's no notion of state criminality here. So anything in gray is criminal processes. Anything in that is tan cream is more tort or civil type actions that would be brought by individual plaintiffs seeking money damages injunctive relief, et cetera, versus criminal processes that might result in the individual criminal punishment of somebody. There is no notion of state criminality. Obviously, it was explored during the drafting of the draft articles on state responsibility at the ILC. Ultimately, those that provision fell away in part due to conceptual problems with understanding how to accord criminal responsibility to a corporate entity like a state. Of course, we're moving in the direction of being able to do that with corporate corporations. And so that may have been a missed opportunity in the part of the ILC. But we do have civil responsibility against states to a certain degree in domestic courts which I'll get into under our Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act here in the United States, but also before the International Court of Justice and the various human rights bodies and treaty bodies, some of whom are courts, some of whom are not. When it comes to individual criminal liability, I'll talk about the options at the ICC, ad hoc tribunals, and also within domestic courts. And then here in the United States, we have these interesting tort remedies that are increasingly being finding echoes and analogs in other states around the world. So, starting with the International Criminal Court, an impenetrable Russian veto prevented, as we know, the referral of the full situation of Syria to the court. That said, there are still some novel theories about how the ICC could proceed against certain actors within the conflict, even if it cannot exercise the full reach of its jurisdiction in Syria. This includes animating the ICC's nationality jurisdiction, particularly over foreign fighters who fail, who hail from ICC member states, focusing on continuing crimes that involve the imposition of trans-boundary harm and human suffering on the territory of neighboring or even farther afield ICC states. This would be invoking the tradition of the Myanmar Bangladesh investigation ongoing. And then there's still a live proposal, although it's not gaining traction necessarily, that states might convince the council to refer the situation involving ISIL. And it was a sort of proto-state at one point now, much more diffuse, no longer really controlling territory. But could the Security Council refer that situation not necessarily grounded in any firm territorial boundaries to the ICC? Although the failure of this referral effort marks a disappointment to many human rights advocates, it's actually not clear that the ICC is best positioned to deliver justice for Syria. For one, of course, we have the magnitude of criminality on display, limitations on the court's subject matter around war crimes committed to non-international armed conflicts, the shortcomings of prior Security Council referrals, particularly controversial textual elements within those resolutions, which we can talk about if people are interested in, that have come at really the price to get consensus before the council. And then of course, the limitations of the ICC are becoming increasingly apparent in the review and reform process as cases fail, resources become more thinly spread, problems with witness intimidation, et cetera. So given the scale and nature of the harm, even though the ICC was supposed to obviate the need to create ad hoc tribunals, there is, I think, a continuing need within the international community to retain this model when it comes to a situation like Syria, where the crime base is so large and the possibility of domestic justice so fleeting that the only way to deliver justice would be through a dedicated institution. So turning to the possibility of ad hoc tribunals, there are a number of theories that have emerged as to how we might build an ad hoc tribunal that would not require a consensus within the Security Council or consent by the Assad regime. And most intriguing has been the idea that individual states could potentially pool their individual respective jurisdictional competencies to create a standalone ad hoc institution. They would obviously have to fund and staff this institution, but this would be essentially reminiscent of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which was, in many respects, the creature of an agreement between the Victoria States after World War II. In addition, might we contemplate additional action before the General Assembly? Obviously, the Assembly is only capable of making recommendations, and the Triple IM has already pushed that envelope to a certain degree, but could the Triple IM be evolved into something that was even more akin to a prosecutorial office that might issue a proto-indictment that could be then picked up by a domestic prosecutor and run within the domestic system? Or could you imagine doing full trials before an institution created by the General Assembly producing what would in essence be a judgment, which could then be domesticated within a domestic system, similar to the way that we domesticate arbitral awards when they're created by an arbitration panel. There was also some talk early in the conflict about a regional tribunal that might emerge from the League of Arab States. This did not move forward, but we know that there's a similar effort being considered in the African Union, this idea of adding a third criminal chamber to the African Court of Human and People's Rights. And so had there been the political will within the League of Arab States, particularly in the early days when the League was quite united against the Assad regime, that might have been a cytos to create a new regional tribunal. And finally, there were proposals that were being explored about creating some sort of specialized chambers within liberated areas within Syria, which could then potentially be adopted through a kind of turnkey relationship by a new Syrian regime had there been a political transition. Obviously that did not come to be and those models did not go anywhere, but there was talk and there's been lots of research and thinking done on the degree to which non-state actors that don't enjoy the imprimatur of a sovereign state still have obligations under humanitarian law at least to deliver justice to a certain degree. And so this could be a kind of prototype for that kind of a model. All of these models discussed could incorporate various elements of hybridity, including when it comes to staffing, substantive law, etc. And so that Syrian jurists could be involved in order to bring a sort of local legitimacy. Despite all these ideas, obviously no concrete proposal for such a tribunal dedicated to Syria has emerged and so we have not been able to explore their actual feasibility. Now, not all of the interaction on the multilateral sphere can be blamed on Russia and the exercise of its veto prerogative with often with China in tow, although this was a decisive factor within the Security Council. The reality is that many states remain fixated on calling for the Security Council referral for the ICC. And despite the obvious and unyielding obstacles to that endeavor, this singular focus on the ICC in many respects eclipsed other worthy avenues for justice. But we have to be honest and say that the international community's reticence was also due to persistent ambivalence about the potential for vigorous criminal accountability to complicate the hoped for peace negotiations and future processes of reconciliation. There were also concerns that any accountability mechanism might sweep in personnel from other states that were gradually ramping up their involvement within Syria. And finally, states were palpably wary of creating a tribunal outside of the council and without Syrian consent that might create a precedent that could be deployed against powerful states by other multilateral configurations. And so for all of these reasons, no proposal for an ad hoc tribunal emerged. So as a result, we've had to really look to domestic courts. And in many respects, domestic courts are filling the accountability gap by invoking a wide array of jurisdictional competencies, not always to their full reach, but really more than they ever have before. And in many respects, the conflict in Syria and to a certain degree, Iraq as well, have realibened the principle of your universal jurisdiction, particularly in Europe. This principle had been in retreat in recent years following a sort of concerted backlash by some powerful states, but it's reemerged as a potential vehicle for justice. These various species of extraterritorial domestic jurisdiction has been facilitated by a whole range of other developments. This includes the incorporation of international crimes into domestic codes, often occasioned by the ratification of the ICC statute, robust regimes of mutual legal assistance that are being created across your continent, greater cooperation between dedicated national war crimes units, both within their prosecutorial authorities and then across the region. The formation of joint investigative units between states and the inexorable integration of European criminal justice processes. We have a newfound interoperability between, as I mentioned, non-governmental organizations, multilateral organizations and national prosecutorial authorities. And there's a new sort of architecture that's bridging the public and private and contributing to a more robust system of international justice, if we can call it that. So as part of the book, I conducted a survey, it's probably a little bit out of date at this point, but I think some of the main threads are still relevant, but of some of the trends and observations around these domestic prosecutions. I'm happy to go into this in more detail in the Q&A, but I'll just highlight some some wave tops here. First, the charges really skew towards terrorism, as opposed to towards international crimes in the stricter sense. Second, to the extent that there are cases involving war crimes charges, they tend to be for quite discreet acts. So for example, the desecration of a corpse, because the evidence just doesn't exist to be able to prove more robust war crimes charges that might exist. Third, interesting gender dynamics. Very few sexual violence charges, although we know these crimes have been legal and within Syria, especially within detention centers, but not always there. Most defendants are men, although some women who have joined ISIL have also faced charges. You have the Begum case in your jurisdiction for their involvement in or their provision of material support to acts of terrorism. We have our own case in the form of Samantha El-Hassani, whose husband joined ISIL. She later joined him there. She brought material and resources that were then shared with her husband's armed group. The couple purchased some Yazidi children who actually the evidence suggests she loved quite genuinely, although the children were mistreated by her husband. She ultimately pled guilty here in the United States for the provision of material support to terrorism. Many of the Yazidi activist groups were pushing our Department of Justice to bring more robust trafficking or slavery type charges, given the involvement of the Yazidi children. They ultimately declined to do so, and so we ended with a guilty plea for material support for terrorism. Other women that have been caught up in the conflict have been treated more as victims, which may be true. I think it depends on the facts, but it also may be based upon sort of sexist assumptions about the role that women can play in armed groups, even intensely misogynistic ones like ISIL. Most of the cases moving forward have been against low level perpetrators and have not been regime figures, and this is very much a reflection of who has fled into the jurisdictions that are willing to prosecute. We're also seeing very sophisticated documentation being used by some of these organizations working at the grassroots and Syrian jurists participating in these prosecutions, helping the European prosecutors understand the nature of the conflict, how to read certain documents, what terminology means, etc. Really attesting to the fact that prosecutorial authorities should develop collaborative and positive relationships with diaspora communities because it can help advance justice in this regard. And then finally, many of these cases have been facilitated by tips by refugees, refugees who bring perpetrators to the attention of authorities, again speaking to the importance of developing positive relationships with refugee communities. Now while important, and these cases are doing some real benefit, they're establishing legal precedent, they're creating some sort of muscle memory within these prosecutorial offices, they're offering a measure of justice to victims, they are punishing individuals, we have to acknowledge that they're episodic and opportunistic. And in many respects, what we see is not really representative of the underlying crime base, just given the nature of who could be prosecuted and where. And so, and to a certain degree, they are somewhat disappointing. But nonetheless, I think the positive results should be celebrated. And then finally, in our last sort of set of cells of that little matrix, if you can remember a while back, we have civil responsibility. So this has all been criminal possible criminal remedies, turning for a minute to civil remedies, we're seeing an increasing willingness of sovereign states to bring their fellow sovereigns to account, particularly for the International Court of Justice under compromising clauses within human rights treaties that give the ICC jurisdiction over disputes arising out of the interpretation or application of the treaty. And this has been interpreted to include state responsibility. So we have the case involving Belgium and the Senegal, the Gambia and Myanmar. And now we have suit initiated by the Netherlands under the torture convention before the ICJ. As we know, at least 12,000 or more individuals have died within Syrian prisons. These depredations have been captured by the horrific photos exfiltrated by a military defector, code named Caesar, that revealed the commission of torture on a really industrial scale. The case is currently sort of just finishing up. I've maybe lost track a little bit of a mandatory negotiation slash arbitration phase. And it remains to be seen if the Syrian regime participates at all. Then that would open the door for the Netherlands. And I would hope other states to join that effort to call Syria to account for essentially fostering a regime of industrial torture. We also have the possibility of tort suits. So given the dearth of charges, victims often have to bear the burden of bringing suit. And so in some systems, tort suits can be brought under international law, or potentially even under local law, if the idea of the transitory tort holds sway in the particular system. The US has an interesting suite of statutes, the Alien Tort Statute, the Torture Victim Protection Act, the Anti-Terrorism Act, which give our federal courts jurisdiction over tort claims, civil claims, essentially by victims, sometimes aliens, sometimes US citizens, depending on the formulation of the particular statute. Most important in the Syrian context, we haven't seen an Alien Tort Statute suit against individuals yet because those individuals just haven't traveled here, in part because of filters that we've put in place within our immigration system to prevent perpetrators from arriving. And then of course, President Trump, who completely shut down the system of asylum or refugee resettlement. And so as a result, perpetrators haven't fled to the United States. We do, however, have our Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, which contains an important exception to foreign sovereign immunity for state sponsors of terror. And Syria has been so designated now for several decades. And so the family of the famed war correspondent Marie Colvin was able to bring suit against the Syrian state under the FSIA. They won a $300 million judgment for her death and assassination. But we have to sort of pause here, I think, before celebrating on the asymmetry of this result. So the heirs of a one, a single US victim are able to take steps to recover against Syria while millions and millions of victims have really no meaningful access to justice elsewhere. So it's a good news story on the one hand, but it leaves non-US victims without a remedy given the formulation of the way the FSIA has been written. So in closing, Syria obviously exhibits, it emerges as a sort of test for the system of international justice and the ability of the international community to deliver justice. And we've largely failed in that test. But as I've tried to highlight over the course of this talk, there are some bright spots and some lessons that can be learned for future conflicts. We have plenty of positive law. The question now is to achieve the political consensus about how to apply that. Our faith in the Security Council I think has eroded, but that has in some respects galvanized the movement for Security Council reform and also empowered other institutions and organs within the United Nations to step up and fill that gap. We've seen a diversification of actors, non-governmental, multilateral, etc., working together collaboratively with a sort of new interoperability to try and advance justice. Lots of creative thinking about jurisdictional theories under the ICC, under domestic law, this idea of pooled jurisdiction, all being pushed by really intrepid justice entrepreneurs, both in government and without. And as a result, we have these set of blueprints for various models that even if they're never deployed in the Syrian context are available now for future conflicts in the event that we can have a configuration of states that can build consensus. We also have seen this unprecedented investment in documentation methods. These methods have advanced the state of the art and are going to be available in other conflict zones. New technological solutions using artificial intelligence, etc., to really advance the state of the art. And then the reenlivening, as I mentioned, of universal jurisdiction. I think these are the types of cases that once one or few get done, it builds confidence within national prosecutorial authorities. The willingness to build more. They develop that muscle memory, as I mentioned. And so I'm hopeful that this will help build out those capacities within national systems. And so while my book catalogs the many obstacles that have sort of been thrown up in this pursuit of justice, I also analyze ways in which justice entrepreneurs have tried to get around this. And the subtitle of the book used to be water always finds its way. And then Oxford University Press thought people would think this was a book about water law. So I ended up dropping that. But I don't know if that metaphor works elsewhere. But the idea being that water will inevitably find its way through cracks and through and around obstacles, even if only at a trickle. And the theory is that, of course, justice is the same way. So while the international community has missed the opportunity upfront to fully integrate justice as part of a component of its reaction to the Syrian conflict, there is now a second chance. As we enter into a phase in which we acknowledge that Assad has essentially prevailed and at least will remain in place for the immediate term, the shift has been made to the reconstructive phase. And there is the possibility that if states could overcome the collective action problems of this, you could imagine some measure of justice being conditionality, a condition for receiving reconstructive aid. And that might be initiating a genuine truth telling process domestically, providing some sort of assistance to these foreign cases, maybe offering some consent, allowing for the opening of files, some sort of a vetting lustration process. This is going to require states to work collaboratively and collectively to place this kind of pressure on the Assad regime in exchange for engaging in a reconstructive process because Russia and likely Iran are, we assume, going to be in the lead. This may be unlikely, but there is this sort of small possibility that there might still be efforts. And of course, all of us who work in this field know we're all incredibly patient, that the arc of justice is long. And as we saw in the Pinochet case and others, sometimes even a decade later, justice can be inspired and re-inspired. And so that I think is the hope, even if nothing happens in this immediate post-conflict period. So I will pause there. I'm really thrilled and excited to hear your questions. And I guess, Maria, you're going to moderate those. And so I'll take my lead from you. Yes. Beth, thank you very, very much. That was so great, so full. And you just unveiled, you know, you mapped out all these justice alternatives in an extremely meticulous way, giving us an understanding of justice, if I may say. If I may say it's not static, but it's dynamic. And what I grabbed, you know, from the tablet, from the book that I'm currently reading, is this call for imagination and also creativity, you know, which shows these elements, you know, of this dynamic. Now, I have already, I have questions myself, but I'm the moderator, so I'm going to collect the first three questions, if that's okay with you, you know, and then we can make some round of questions. So the first one is about the veto. And to what extent do you think that the system of a veto right for permanent members in the Security Council has affected, okay, the possibility for justice for serious victims? I think you addressed that, but maybe, you know, you have something else to add. The next question is from Francisco who asks, to what extent there are prospects for a Truth or Reconciliation Commission to operate in Syria in the near future? And if so, how would such transitional justice mechanism help or hinder the work of criminal justice, you know? And if I can add one more question before I give you back the floor is from Victoria, which is very, very interesting. Actually, this is wondering if you could elaborate more on the local administration of justice. So the situations in particular in camps in northern Syria, militating favour of repatriation and local prosecution by the autonomous authority, what are the capabilities, what are the opportunities, and do you think that states and international bodies like the Commission of the Quarry or the independent mechanisms support these prosecutions? So I have seven questions, can you believe it? Okay, I knew I have. So I think I'll start with those. Yeah, yeah, I'll start with those three. Those are terrific questions. Thank you. When it comes to the veto, indeed, we have seen multiple exercises of the veto by Russia on everything from sanctions to humanitarian assistance to potential accountability. What has been more unique is the willingness of China to be in tow. China rarely exercises its veto if it doesn't have to. And so this is, you know, the second veto was unnecessary and often China would align itself with the regional power, and in this case, the Arab League. And it did not do that in this matter. So it clearly China was aligning itself with Russia or with its own independent ideological sort of approach to this particular conflict when it comes to non-intervention opposition to the West, etc. So that was quite interesting. But indeed, when it comes to the Security Council as a progenitor of justice institutions, the veto has really hampered that and has hampered the ability to think creatively about other models that might be used because it was pretty clear that Russia was just going to veto everything. And so I think in a way, it sort of debilitated other states that might, if they thought there was some possibility of a negotiated outcome that you could get a shared model that could be agreed on by all parties, it might have happened as a result and everyone knew Russia was going to veto everything. And so people would just throw proposals out there knowing that they were going to be subjected to veto and then they would wheel that veto against Russia and say, oh, you're propping up a regime. And so we got to a point where it was really that the discourse within the council chamber was really quite dysfunctional around a lot of these issues. The question about a truth commission is quite interesting. I have a chapter in the book that's called Transitional Justice Without Transition. And I spoke with a number of individuals who know Syrian and know the Syrian regime quite well. And they were quite intrigued by the possibility of some sort of genuine reconciliation process. Half of the country is displaced and a half of the country that's displaced is displaced internationally. And so what is going to bring those people back? How will they trust that the system will absorb them and accept them and that they will not be subjected to some sort of retaliation? The Assad regime has created all sorts of property rules that if property is abandoned, it can achieve to the state or be given to loyalists. And so it's not clear people have access to their property, even if they feel inclined and safe in terms of coming home. And so if Assad is willing and genuinely willing to contemplate the return of some of those refugees, he's going to have to create some sort of a system that's going to welcome them. And you can imagine some sort of a TRC process doing that. Now it's important to acknowledge that we can't shove reconciliation down the throats of victims. It's a two-way street. It's not about you have to ask for forgiveness in some respect when it comes to reconciliation. You can't demand it from the victims unilaterally. And whether or not the victims are going to be willing to engage in any sort of a reconciliation option, if they're not receiving anything tangible in return and from everything from their property to some sort of a truth telling or acknowledgement of harms, that remains to be seen. You can imagine if the international community were united around this reconstructive process, they could say we're going to condition reconstruction aid on seeing definitive progress towards the standing up, the conceptual relation and the standing up, and then the implementation of a genuine truth telling process. Whether or not we can achieve that sort of collective response I think is the question and is likely a challenge. She's given how fractured the international community is. I would be hopeful that with the new Biden administration coming in, there would be a new commitment to explore some of these ideas and the ability to convene some sort of an international consensus in a way that the Trump administration was not able to do. Finally, Victoria's really great question. And the book, honestly, I have to admit, doesn't get into this quite as much because we weren't as familiar that the phenomenon hadn't sort of emerged in the public conscious yet. Obviously, there were people in camps. And to a certain degree, the non-state actors that were running those camps, were holding some justice processes. And we know Common Article 3 clearly contemplates this because it speaks about the need to provide due process in any sort of judicial process. And so although it doesn't mandate the holding of let's say war crimes trials, for example, by non-state actors and non-international armed conflicts, it certainly contemplates that they are going to be happening. So then the question arises, which is implicit in the question, what is the role of the international community here? Is there a role on capacitation, on technical assistance, any forms of support, or are there concerns that these processes might be fundamentally unfair, in which case the international community would not want to somehow ratify them? And I think in many respects, it depends on the non-state actors. So I do, in the book, talk through some of the justice processes that ISIL implemented under its, you know, incredibly perotious version of Sharia law. And of course, those are not the kind of processes that the international community should be supporting at all, and nor was ISIL at all open to considerations around due process. I think other opposition groups are more open to doing truly fair processes, and there might be a role for the international community in capacitating technical assistance here. The organization Geneva Call, for example, works very closely with non-state groups around IHL compliance, and this could be built into work. So if they could receive the funds they need to do that in the camps, there might be an ability to do justice there. Now, there are hundreds and hundreds of people who are being detained in those camps, and for many of them, their only crime, such as it is, would have been joining the group and otherwise supporting the group. We may not have evidence of the actual commission of what we think about as war crimes. In other words, the mistreatment of detained persons or civilians. And so then the question is, do we want to support additional prosecutions around this idea of material support for terrorism, which is a crime that the United States has essentially exported from our own federal penal code. It has an incredibly capacious reach, arguably too, too broader reach. And so I think, you know, thinking about demobilization, thinking about de-radicalization, and really investing in those processes. There are a number of, the UK obviously has its own, I'm not an expert on these, but Denmark, even Saudi Arabia, you know, put an asterisk there. But there are these de-radicalization programs out there and really exploring what works and what might be seen to work in instead of thinking about, who do we prosecute and what do we prosecute them for? Thank you. I have, oh my God, we have 13 questions in total, you know, so I'm trying to make them in groups. So, going back to the truth and reconciliation commission, one question was, what kind of model, maybe the South African model could have in your, do you think that it would be a possibility given the nature of the conflict which is protracted and bloody? That's the first question. The second question is related to what you just mentioned about the foreign fighters. Could you speak more about the sexism you mentioned in the crimes of the individual, I'm not offering fighters a charge with, the one million dollar question, what is your view on humanitarian intervention by other countries, okay? Can I add one more, is that okay? I don't know if my brain can take one more. Okay, okay, I stop here. I see them on the screen, so we won't forget them. The TRC model, I mean, what made that TRC model work is we had the apartheid regime willing to engage in genuine negotiations with the opposition, the African national congress, and that the existence of the TRC was seen as the only way to sort of transition that state from an apartheid state to a democratic state in which the black majority would enjoy full democratic principles, et cetera. Reparations was a part of it and amnesty was a part of it and amnesty in exchange for a truth telling process with always the theory being the threat of prosecution if in fact the individual perpetrators didn't come forward. I think there's still real value to that model. Obviously we know now looking at South Africa, it hasn't played out as I think we romanticize the TRC and I think folks that are involved in that process will bring us down to earth in terms of the reality. Reparations have not been forthcoming. There was not a real threat by the end of prosecution and so arguably many perpetrators didn't come forward. It was unique in that it was focused on both victims and perpetrators. The earlier truth conditions models that had emerged out of Latin America and the the denouement of those dirty wars were much more focused on victims giving victims an opportunity to bear witness and I think where the TRC was important is it brought perpetrators into that process. Now that means we have to be willing to countenance the idea of an amnesty and we know that international law has evolved considerably and the question is when might an amnesty be a legitimate amnesty that should be respected by the international community versus a kind of a self amnesty or a blanket amnesty that doesn't come with any conditionality around truth telling or doesn't come with reparations or other broader as you said dynamic visions of justice. We don't know yet that we're still at the level of theory but I think we could imagine coming up with an institution that would have some sort of a non-penal outcomes for perpetrators in exchange for their willingness to give testimony and to sort of reveal how the Syrian state was essentially exploited to engage in the crimes against humanity that we saw within Syria so it's obviously something that's very much worth exploring but when it comes to sexism what I meant was you know so often we see you know women are playing really central roles in armed groups including as I mentioned extremely misogynistic ones and there's attempting to it's often a temptation to assume that they're victims they've been duped they didn't know what they were getting into and I think the Syrian conflict if we're honest with ourselves has really revealed that women have played very essential roles they've been recruiters they've been radicalizers maybe not necessarily combatants in the strict sense but they've been supporting combat operations they've been deemed essential to the state in terms of the way the ISIL proto caliphate was conceptualized and so you know I think each case has to be looked at individually obviously to determine whether or not actual material contributions to the commission of international crimes were made by women in which case they should be held accountable for those under whatever the operative legal framework is we shouldn't just assume that every woman that has found herself in within the caliphate or having joined the fight in some respect or another is somehow a victim you know women are are capable of making autonomous choices and then finally on the humanitarian intervention question I mean I still was quite disappointed by President Obama's reaction to the Syrian conflict I think there's much more that could have been done both from the perspective of trying to bring about a resolution to that conflict putting much more pressure on the Assad regime and maybe even considering a genuine kinetic humanitarian intervention we then saw the Trump administration use force to the extent that the Obama administration did use force within Syria it was generally against ISIL targets and so you know query whether that created an international armed conflict because you have a state using force on the territory without necessarily the overt consent of the territorial state in this case Syria but of course they had a shared foe with respect to those attacks and so when ISIL was the target even though it was technically on the territory of Syria was there an implicit consent there by Syria fast forward to the Trump administration we did see airstrikes after the use of chemical weapons in in kinship tune to tune in other places and I honestly am a believer in the idea of humanitarian intervention I would like there to be such a thing in the world I think what needs to happen is the development of a sort of a doctrine if you would around it that really pins down the preconditions for the engagement of humanitarian intervention and that includes the gravity of the underlying crimes that are being responded to the fact that this is the last option a last resort option other efforts have been attempted and have failed it must be discreet it must be proportionate it must be related to the underlying acts and I think you know I need to come out in any sort of praise of the Trump administration but I think that that was would have been appropriate and was appropriate for the international community to respond to the use of chemical weapons against civilians in a conflict situation with kinetic force without the consent of Syria I think that it would have been an appropriate use of humanitarian intervention whether or not President Trump went through the all of the steps that I would like to see in this sort of rigor of that determination including building a multilateral coalition rather than sort of going at it alone it didn't happen I don't think anyone else is even claiming to be engaged in a humanitarian intervention I mean turkey maybe sort of makes a nod in that direction but some of its rationales particularly given its concern about the Kurdish insurgents within within Syria but I think realistically there isn't any other truly humanitarian intervention within Syria Excellent so that deep breath and we move to the second round of questions so very interesting question about social media and new technologies in general I would say what do you think what would be the role what would be the contribution into the whole thing justice framework another question about the potential role of the european court of human rights especially with the requirement of the exhaustion of domestic remedies you know in countries whereas we have the commission of inquiry concluding that Russia allegedly has committed war crimes one more thing one question was very much about the ICC from Marco to what extent you know Syria is a demonstration of the failure of the ICC because since we need so many other decentralized mechanisms and how can we avoid you know the trap the perception of double standard something that we had with a Nuremberg type of tribunals should we stop here and maybe just yeah I think yeah three three times about my maximum I'm over 50 at this point so all right so social media terrific question what I would love to see and I think we're getting in that direction I would love to see the ability to collect information in real time on the ground immediately lock in the metadata including you know GPS coordinates everything about that information preserve that we call it hashing you basically give it a unique fingerprint a digital fingerprint and the minute some even the tiniest change is made it changes the fingerprint and so we can we can conclude that that particular image is authentic that it was taken where it purports to have been taken and it and it embodies what it purports to embody I would love to see courts be willing to explore and understand and maybe take expert testimony about how that technology works so that you could imagine a video being essentially self authenticating where you could put a testimony on that says listen this video was identified within the Syrian archives which is one of the key documenters out there it the GPS coordinates reveal that it was taken here here's what it shows it zoomed in here's the you know the code on the ballistic so that we know that it came from the Syrian arsenal okay what does that say it says that a Syrian bomb was used in a particular attack but we should be able to say that and and to assume that from that piece of digital evidence maybe then in conjunction with expert testimony etc rather than having to rely on a witness who can say I was standing there and I saw the ballistic come in or maybe it's supplementing that that testimony and making it not unnecessary to bring multiple witnesses in to corroborate what's being what's being shown in this social media the problem though is we have so much of this data that finding the best evidence of a particular incident or attack is really difficult and so organizations here in the bay area like benetech have been creating tools that allow these social these organizations these documentation organizations including the triple I am to deduplicate in other words to take a massive of digital images and or video clips that appear to show a particular attack and create either a composite of those or figure out which is the cleanest version that has experienced the least tampering because unfortunately what some documenters do who are not aware of the rules of evidence and how those operate they'll they'll tamper with the evidence they'll put arrows in they'll put a title on it they'll crop it to make it more pretty and all anytime you've you've touched this you are making it less likely that a court is going to be willing to accept it particularly if you have judges who are sort of nervous about digital archiving and don't really understand how the whole process of hashing etc works and so I think this is going to be a grand experiment in the degree to which some of these social media or artifacts can be used we have already seen in Europe that the very social media profiles of some of these perpetrators have been used against them precisely because they're posting so-called trophy videos of themselves and some of them actually show ipso facto the commission of a crime so you know the holding of a severed head that's desecration of a corpse and so if the national system has that crime within their penal code they can prosecute that individual based upon their own social media profile. European Court yeah this is interesting I haven't followed it too closely but of course as you say Turkey and Russia both fall within the jurisdiction and we know that the European Court has gotten much more comfortable with thinking about extra territorial application of the human rights obligations of state parties even outside the sort of juridical space of Europe and so you know we've come a long way since the Bankovich opinion I think and so you could imagine the European Court thinking through that but yes indeed as the question mentions there are concerns about the exhaustion of local remedies and the question is sort of what are those remedies and where where can those remedies be found so are we really expecting a Syrian victim to go to Russia to advance its claims or you know even in Europe it's you can there's there's no notion of sovereign jurisdiction necessarily in many European states because of the principles of sovereign immunity and so what counts as exhaustion of local remedies I think is going to be important there's nothing in Syria as we know the courts are operating to a certain degree but there are essentially tools of the state and they're being used as tools of oppression and so there's there's no genuine justice there I think we will see cases moving forward as soon as individuals have been able to show that they've tried to advance their claims elsewhere and then the question remains to what extent will the European Court be willing to a exercise its jurisdiction extra territorially here and be this question of the overlap between international humanitarian law and international human rights law and when would humanitarian law trump human rights law when might they be working in parallel with each other it's the classic lex specialis problem but as we've seen human rights bodies including the treaty bodies but also some of the regional courts have shown quite a facility with international humanitarian law are able to mesh those bodies of law um and then the last question was oh the failure of the ICC why should I take issue and I don't think I know you wanted to speak your question Marco and I'm sorry that we're doing it in this webinar type format you know you often hear that oh it's the failure of the ICC it's not the ICC that failed right states created the ICC the ICC has the jurisdictional regime that it has and it's premised upon either the territorial state or the state of nationality having ratified the statute those are the two one of those two preconditions has to be met before the prosecutor can act on her own motion and so that trigger mechanism has been foreclosed because Syria has not ratified the statute secondarily the an alternative trigger mechanism is consensus in front of the council and because the veto is able to break consensus and Russia has been you know increasingly exercising its veto which is its prerogative to do as a permanent member of the security council we've blocked that particular trigger mechanism from moving forward and so you know it's not the ICC's fault that it doesn't have jurisdiction it's the fault of the architects of the ICC and ultimately the architects of our system of international peace and justice now that said there were proposals that were put forward to Fatou Ben-Suda the prosecutor as to how she could activate the nationality jurisdiction with respect to the situation involving foreign fighters because so many foreign fighters came from ICC member states you know up in the thousands of them they tended to be more low level to the extent that they were in more senior positions and I track this to a certain degree in the book many of them have been killed on the battlefield and so she has been reserving and part of her new policy approach has been to focus only on low level perpetrators to the extent that it could build up the chain of command and focusing on low level foreign fighters is not likely to build up to any chain of command that would also fall within her personal jurisdiction and so she declined to move forward notwithstanding these proposals that she had latent jurisdiction here. Yes, can I have a very short one? One more short one I do have to teach at 10 so I've got two minutes but let's do one more. Okay you have to teach at 10 then I don't want to I mean it's too much we don't have time best you know okay sorry no no no no no don't worry I mean that was extremely rich very very interesting seriously interesting and that's why I trigger so many questions I want to thank you very very much for being with us early in the morning in California I hope we will meet very soon in person whether the Hague or London or somewhere else I want also to say that in the chat we put the information about your book you know for the attendees and yeah Danny did it you know so there is also a promotion code you know for the book of Beth the last book that I enjoy very much while I'm reading now but that was really really full really thought-provoking extremely fascinating I had a question but I will email you these outsourcing of investigative mechanisms I think it's something really really intriguing once more on behalf of the world crime racist groups on behalf of the worst studies department on behalf of all the other days I would like to thank you so much you know for for for this extremely interesting and useful hour and this is a very fascinating discussion and I'm looking forward you know for the discussions about that but really thank you so much for having me I really appreciate you all of you being here I've copied and pasted the Q&A and I'd be happy to engage with you and further conversation about these issues so everyone be well be safe and I hope we can be in person in some point soon thank you so much thank you all thank you all bye bye thank you Beth ciao ciao bye ciao thank you