[JURIST] Spain’s top court on Monday agreed [press release, in Spanish] to investigate claims by a Spanish woman who alleges her brother was tortured and murdered by Bashar al-Assad’s security forces. According to the woman, who is identified only as AH for security reasons, her brother was executed in 2013 in Damascus by Syrian security forces. Spanish High Court Judge Eloy Velasco has asked Syrian authorities to appoint legal representation in Spain for the nine security officers implicated in the torture and murder of the woman’s brother. The case is the first criminal complaint accepted against President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces by a European court. The lawyers for AH contend [press release] that Spanish courts have jurisdiction over the complaint due to the woman’s status as a Spanish citizen. Velasco determined that the complaint has standing in the Spanish Court system due to international norms that consider family members of those who have disappeared as a result of international crimes to be equally considered victims of those crimes.

The Syrian Civil War [JURIST backgrounder] has been ongoing since 2011 when opposition groups first began protesting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and the increasingly bloody nature of the conflict has put pressure on the international community to intervene. In February the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported [JURIST report] that the Syrian government is systematically exterminating detainees. In November Human Rights Watch released a report stating that the practice of caging captured soldiers and civilians constitutes hostage-taking [JURIST report] and an outrage against their personal dignity. In October France opened a torture investigation [JURIST report] into the actions of the Syrian government under Assad in detention facilities. Additionally, Amnesty International released a report [JURIST report] in October detailing the possibility of war crimes in Syria. The AI report criticized the Syrian government by stating that “they have maintained unlawful sieges, restricted humanitarian assistance deliveries, deliberately attacked civilians, and carried out indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, arbitrary detentions, abductions and enforced disappearances.”