Z3 was 12 years old when he joined the protests against Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2012 in the city of Aleppo. In return, he says, police dripped melting plastic onto his bare legs and electrocuted him.
Z1 was a teacher of maths and English in Damascus, and was known for her online political statements. In 2012, she was picked up by intelligence officers of the Syrian air force during a trip to the countryside and, according to her account, was detained and beatenfor seven months in an underground prison.
Z12 is the mother of 15-year-old Z13. Both were arrested for the first time at a checkpoint in the Syrian capital in October 2013, and were sexually-assaulted, beaten, electrocuted and burned over a number of years at government facilities. Z13 says she saw a teenage girl die after being repeatedly raped.
Z stands for ‘Zeugin’, or witness.
Z1, Z3, Z12 and Z13 are among 16 unidentified men and women – refugees from Syria – whose allegations of torture between 2011 and 2017 are contained in a 120-page criminal complaint filed by human rights lawyers to the state prosecutor in Vienna in May, the first such complaint in Austria against the Syrian authorities.
The document, currently sealed for legal reasons, accuses 24 senior members of the Assad government of crimes against humanity, including torture, murder, extermination, serious bodily harm and deprivation of liberty. Lawyers briefed BIRN on the contents of the complaint.
It is based on the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’, whereby a state or international body can claim jurisdiction over the perpetrator of a crime regardless of where that crime was committed.
And it reaches back to the last time Europe saw such refugee flight, when Yugoslavia unravelled in the last decade of the 20th century and Vienna opened its doors to refugees from across the collapsing federation.
Then, Viennese human rights lawyers interviewed 1,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) refugees from the Bosnian town of Zvornik, among tens of thousands driven out by Bosnian Serb forces in the first days of the 1992-95 war. When the United Nations set up the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, in 1993, the lawyers submitted their testimony. Justice only came many years later.
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