Justice at last? Covering Syrian justice playing out on multiple stages

Since the fall of the Assad regime in late 2024, journalists covering Syria have been confronted with a rapidly evolving judicial and para-judicial landscape. Post-Assad justice now rests on a heterogeneous constellation of mechanisms: unprecedented national transitional justice processes, locally driven and often informal truth-seeking initiatives that are both reactive and fragile, promises of future trials, alongside an unprecedented diversification of international judicial activity—whether through United Nations–mandated mechanisms or proceedings brought before a growing number of European courts exercising universal jurisdiction. For the press, documenting these developments requires an exceptionally high degree of vigilance, methodological rigor and critical judgment.
At the intersection of these three levels—national, local and international—journalists are tasked with explaining slow, highly technical, partial, politically sensitive and at times opaque processes to audiences marked either by decades of dictatorship and war, or by the physical and emotional distance of exile. This is a terrain where memory, law and politics inevitably intersect; where the constant risk of instrumentalisation of narratives, evidence or legal frameworks coexists with the inherently uncertain realities of a fragile and contested political transition.
This panel seeks to reflect on these journalistic challenges and on how to report on justice in—and about—a country attempting both to experience it and to redefine it.
Moderated by Thierry Cruvellier.
Organised in association with Fondation Hirondelle.