UN Report on Syria: Human Rights Violations and War Crimes by All Armed Parties

A new United Nations report on Syria’s civil war has documented war crimes and crimes against humanity committed not just by government forces, but by non-state armed groups as well — a rare instance of the UN’s independent investigators assigning direct culpability to virtually every major party controlling territory inside the country.

Starvation as a Weapon

The report, the seventh submitted by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic since the panel’s formation in 2011, focuses heavily on the humanitarian toll of ongoing sieges. Widespread attacks and blockades on civilian areas by pro-government forces are producing mass casualties, malnutrition, and outright starvation, the Commission found, according to a press release from the UN Human Rights Office accompanying the report’s release. The Commission singled out the Yarmouk refugee camp and surrounding areas of Reef Damascus as sites where fighting must cease immediately to allow humanitarian aid to reach civilians trapped by the siege.

The report is set to be formally presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 18, continuing a documentation effort the Commission has sustained through five periodic update reports and two dedicated thematic papers since 2011 — making it, even at this relatively early stage in the war, already the longest-running commission of inquiry in UN history.

A First: Naming a Non-State Armed Group for Crimes Against Humanity

Perhaps the report’s most significant development is a legal first for the Commission’s work: for the first time, investigators identified specific non-state armed groups operating in Al-Raqqah governorate as having committed torture rising to the level of a crime against humanity. Both pro-government forces and non-state armed groups, the Commission concluded, have carried out massacres over the course of the conflict — a finding that pointedly refuses to frame the war’s atrocities as originating from only one side.

Commission Chair Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, a Brazilian human rights expert who has led the panel since its inception, has been characteristically blunt about the absence of consequences facing perpetrators regardless of their affiliation. In earlier Commission findings covering a similar period, Pinheiro’s panel noted that the perpetrators of documented war crimes “act in defiance of international law” and “do not fear accountability,” a pattern this March report’s findings extend rather than reverse.

A Conflict “Entering Its Fourth Year”

The Commission’s report frames the persistence of these violations partly as a consequence of the international community’s own paralysis. “The absolute impunity that pervades the conflict, now entering its fourth year, is utterly unacceptable,” the Commission stated, according to the OHCHR release, warning that continued inaction “has provided the space for the proliferation of actors in Syria, each pursuing its own agenda and contributing to the radicalization and escalation of violence.” The report explicitly calls on states that hold influence over parties to the conflict — a pointed reference to Syria’s own external backers as well as those supporting various opposition factions — to use that leverage to compel compliance with international humanitarian law, rather than simply condemning violations after the fact.

A Documentation Effort That Would Stretch On for Over a Decade

What this March 2014 report could not have fully anticipated is just how long the Commission’s work — and the conflict itself — would ultimately continue. The Commission would go on to produce more than 30 separate reports between 2011 and the eventual fall of the Assad government, interviewing more than 11,000 victims and witnesses over that span and contributing evidence that would later support prosecutions in national courts, including a landmark case in Koblenz, Germany, that delivered the conflict’s first-ever conviction for crimes against humanity, according to the Commission’s own retrospective accounting of its work published years later.

For Syrian civilians living through the siege conditions the Commission described in Yarmouk and elsewhere in early 2014, that eventual accountability remained, at the time, a distant and uncertain prospect — one that this report’s careful, evenly distributed assignment of blame across warring factions was designed to lay groundwork for, even if the war itself showed no sign of ending anytime soon.

For related coverage of international human rights accountability efforts, see our piece on impunity in Brazil 50 years after the military coup, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.