Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will answer “for his crimes to the Syrian people,” but now is not the time to refer him to the International Criminal Court (ICC), says Stephen Rapp, head of the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice. In a wide-ranging interview Wednesday (July 18) with Al-Monitor Washington correspondent Barbara Slavin hours after Assad’s brother-in-law and defense minister died in a bomb blast in Damascus, Rapp, who has long experience prosecuting foreign leaders for ignominious crimes, said the Hague-based court lacks the capacity to investigate Assad adequately and that a new Syrian Justice and Accountability Center would amass the evidence to put the Syrian leader on trial — preferably in his own country after a political transition.
Rapp also said it was not necessary to call the conflict a “civil war” to prosecute Assad and his remaining henchmen, and that such a designation could actually make it harder to build cases because the laws of war give combatants more leeway than human rights treaties signed by the Syrian regime. The US official also warned the Syrian opposition that they could face prosecution if they retaliate against innocent people from Assad’s Alawite sect.