Berlin, July 16 2025. The Federal Prosecutor's Office indicted five men under the principle of universal jurisdiction, who are suspected of having committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Yarmouk, a Palestinian district in Damascus. If the charges are upheld, four suspected members of the Syrian militia “Free Palestine Movement” (FPM) and one suspected Syrian secret service agent will stand trial for homicide, torture and deprivation of liberty before the Koblenz Higher Regional Court. The charges also include murder and the use of prohibited methods of warfare. The five defendants were arrested in July 2024 on strong suspicion of crimes against humanity and have been in custody since then. The Koblenz Higher Regional Court will decide in the coming weeks whether the case will go to trial.
During the course of the Syrian revolution, mass protests against the Assad regime erupted in Yarmouk – also known as the “capital of the Palestinian diaspora” – from 2011 onwards. The government and its allied militias, including the FPM, which controlled the camp, brutally cracked down on the protests. Among these forces were the accused militiamen. According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, they took part in the violent suppression of a peaceful demonstration against the Syrian regime on 13 July 2012. Subsequently, the population of Yarmouk was held under siege from December 2012 onwards.
“I will never forget the days of the hunger blockade. We were abandoned by the world. We cooked grass and ate cats. The hunger ate into our bodies - we practically vanished. Many died of thirst, from lack of medicine, from a winter without heating and electricity that lasted nearly a year. That the Assad regime is no longer in power is good. And the fact that there is now a court case gives me hope for justice,” says Aeham Ahmad, musician and survivor from Yarmouk.
In July 2013, the Palestinian neighborhood of Yarmouk in Damascus was completely cordoned off. From then on, roughly 18,000 trapped civilians were cut off from all provisions of food, medicine and humanitarian aid. As a result, approximately 200 civilians died of hunger and typhus until the regime almost completely destroyed the camp with barrel bombs in 2015. “Besiege, starve, force to surrender” became a strategy of war used by the Assad regime to brutally target hundreds of thousands of civilians in areas controlled by the opposition.
In February 2023, the Berlin Higher Regional Court (Kammergericht) convicted a member of a pro-Assad militia of war crimes and murder in Yarmouk. He had fired a grenade at a crowd of people waiting for UN aid packages at a checkpoint in the besieged neighborhood. The trial, which was accompanied by ECCHR, marked an important legal step, but was criticized for being restricted to a single crime and for not sufficiently addressing the systematic nature of the blockade.
“To date, no German court has investigated the systematic siege and starvation of the civilian population in Yarmouk,” says Andreas Schüller, Director of the International Crimes and Accountability Program at the ECCHR. “New proceedings should close this gap and legally address the brutal warfare waged against entire districts. The experiences from Yarmouk reveal alarming parallels to the present: even today in Gaza, humanitarian aid structures are being deliberately destroyed, supply routes are being cut off, and civilians are being endangered by the deprivation of essential resources. Using hunger as a weapon—whether in Yarmouk or Gaza—is a war crime.”
For years, proceedings based on the principle of universal jurisdiction have played a central role in the legal processing of the crimes committed by the Syrian regime – often as the only avenue for those affected to obtain justice. Most recently, the Syrian military doctor Alaa M. was sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court in June. Now, the fall of the Assad regime presents the opportunity to advance future transitional justice efforts in Syria itself.
“Proceedings based on the principle of universal jurisdiction are an important bridge for our human rights work in Syria. We do not yet have the opportunity to conduct criminal proceedings on the ground ourselves. However, the trials in Germany represent an important impulse from outside – one that can be carried into Syrian institutions and contribute to reckoning with the crimes and rebuilding the wounded society,” says Fadel Abdulghany from the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
ECCHR has been working intensively since 2012 to address the crimes in Syria through international criminal law and supports survivors of the crimes in Yarmouk who wish to participate in the proceedings as joint plaintiffs.
