An Austrian court in Vienna found two former Syrian officials guilty on July 7 of torture and sexual abuse committed during the early years of the Syrian uprising. The former head of Syria’s General Intelligence Directorate in Raqqa, identified as Khaled al-H. under Austrian privacy rules, and the former police chief in the city, identified as Moussab Abou R., were each sentenced to eight years in prison. Both men had applied for asylum in Austria in 2015. The BBC reported that Khaled al-H. was brought to Austria by the former domestic intelligence service at the request of Israeli spy agency Mossad as part of what media described as “Operation White Milk.” Separately, a BBC investigative report published the same day identified and located three specific individuals — including a former Ukrainian traffic policeman turned Russian-backed separatist operative — accused of running or staffing Russia’s detention facilities in occupied Ukraine, where the UN’s human rights office has described torture as “systematic and widespread.” The BBC mapped 93 detention sites in occupied Ukraine and 102 in Russia, and documented the cases of survivors including Liudmyla Huseinova, who was held for three years and thirteen days and subjected to sexual violence and psychological torture.
The received wisdom
International human rights advocates and progressive commentators will correctly note that the Austrian verdict represents exactly the kind of accountability the international legal system is designed to deliver. Universal jurisdiction — the legal doctrine allowing states to prosecute atrocity crimes regardless of where they occurred or the nationality of the perpetrator — is one of the genuine achievements of the post-World War Two legal order. The verdict in Vienna follows similar landmark prosecutions in Germany, where Syrian regime officials have faced trial under the same principle. The argument is that even imperfect, slow, geographically limited justice matters: it documents atrocities for history, provides some measure of acknowledgment for survivors, and perhaps — over a long horizon — deters future perpetrators who might one day find themselves in a country willing to prosecute. This reading is not naive. It is the considered view of serious scholars of transitional justice, and its humanitarian case is strong.
A different read
The Vienna verdict is genuinely worth celebrating as a specific legal outcome. Eight years in prison for the man who ran a torture facility in Raqqa from 2011 to 2013 — who ordered or failed to prevent the stripping, beating, electric shocks, and sexual violence that Liudmyla Huseinova and others described in testimony — is justice of a sort, however delayed and geographically coincidental. The legal principle it affirms is important.
But the broader picture into which that verdict fits is considerably more sobering, and it demands the kind of clear-eyed realism that rights advocates sometimes resist. The BBC’s investigation found that two of the three accused Russian-linked torturers it identified — men accused of beating Ukrainian detainees, forcing them to eat soil mixed with rubbish, and conducting sexual violence — are living openly in Russia, having acquired Russian passports and resumed civilian lives. One was photographed at Russian Interior Ministry events as recently as 2024. Another appears to live with his family in Russia’s Rostov region. A third is registered as a taxi driver in Omsk. None of them will be prosecuted. None of them will see the inside of a courtroom in any jurisdiction that can reach them. The UN added Russia to its blacklist for suspected sexual violence in conflict zones in May 2025, and Russia dismissed the allegations as “groundless lies.”
The contrast between these two outcomes — one jurisdiction reaching back decades to convict men who made the mistake of seeking asylum in a functioning legal state; another jurisdiction being utterly unable to touch men operating under the protection of a nuclear-armed government — tells us something uncomfortable about the actual architecture of international justice. It works, to the extent it works at all, on the weak: on mid-level officials who fled to the wrong country, who lacked the protection of a major power, whose governments could not shield them. It does not work — and shows no sign of being made to work — on the powerful: on states that have made atrocity their policy, that absorb the perpetrators back into the bureaucracy, that treat UN condemnation as a propaganda inconvenience to be dismissed at the podium.
This is not an argument for abandoning universal jurisdiction prosecutions — they serve genuine purposes, including the historical documentation that survivors like Huseinova deserve. It is an argument against allowing those prosecutions to substitute, in Western political thinking, for the harder reckoning that mass atrocity under state protection actually demands. The International Criminal Court’s track record against major-power perpetrators is not encouraging. The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin in March 2023 over the deportation of Ukrainian children. He attended a BRICS summit in South Africa in 2023 without being arrested. South Africa — an ICC member — chose not to execute the warrant.
The lesson is not that international law is useless. The lesson is that international law, absent enforcement, is more accurately described as an international norm — aspirational, morally significant, genuinely important for the long historical record, but not a substitute for deterrence in the conventional sense. And deterrence, against a state that tortures systematically, requires something beyond what any court can provide.
What to watch
Watch whether the Austrian verdict produces any diplomatic reaction from Syria’s new post-Assad government in Damascus — Ankara-mediated normalisation talks are ongoing, and how the new Syrian authorities respond to accountability proceedings against former regime officials will reveal something about the transitional justice dimension of Syria’s reconstruction. Watch the BBC investigation’s legal follow-on: Ukrainian prosecutors have opened proceedings, but extradition from Russia is not possible, so any accountability will depend on whether the accused individuals ever travel to a jurisdiction that acts. Watch the ICJ and ICC dockets for any procedural developments in Russia-related cases — and watch, more importantly, whether any NATO government moves to tie ceasefire or sanctions-relief discussions to a concrete accountability mechanism. And watch the Austrian verdict’s reception in Germany, which has prosecuted Syrian officials most aggressively and is now the primary European locus of this particular model of accountability justice.
— J