In the final instalment of this series, two vital cases in the search for justice for the civilians allegedly killed by the Syrian government continue in European courts. In Spain, Amal identified her brother Abdul in the 27,000 photos in the Caesar File – but the attempt to prosecute his killers is frustrated by Spanish law.
EP 2:
In France, lawyer Clemence Bectarte triggers an investigation into the disappearance of her client’s brother and nephew in a detention centre in Damascus. The outcome is devastating for the family but a French court does order the trial in absentia of senior Syrian officials. And the German federal court successfully prosecutes a former Syrian intelligence officer for crimes against humanity. But families face a harrowing ordeal in the search for truth and justice in Syria.
EP 1:
About 27,000 photos of dead and tortured civilian detainees were smuggled out of Syrian government secret archives by a military defector codenamed “Caesar” and made public in 2014. They were presented to the United Nations as evidence of the Bashar al-Assad regime’s killing of 11,000 civilian detainees in a single region between March 2011 and August 2013. After the search for justice failed to produce any prosecutions, victims’ families turned to the courts in Europe.
This two-part documentary series, The Lost Souls of Syria, follows two cases for more than five years – one in Spain, where a woman identifies her brother as one of the bodies from Caesar’s photos, and another in France, where a dual national helps his lawyer investigate the disappearance of his brother and nephew. The film includes testimony from Caesar and his accomplice, “Sami”.
