Gareth Browne

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160 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Gareth Browne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Equal before the law? Transitional justice in Syria · 18 May 2026 podcast

And essentially there are two tracks.

Last year, President Ahmed Shahra announced this Transitional Justice Commission, which is a special body which was going to look at the idea of transitional justice, look at lessons from other conflicts, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, places like that.

And try to develop a system, perhaps a special court for the Syrian context.

So this was one track, and it was very much a more ideological international human rights law led process.

However, the trials that have begun in the last few weeks are actually happening as a result of movements by the Syrian Ministry of Justice.

And they're fundamentally based on the legal system that all

already existed in Syria prior to Assad's falling.

Syria had fifty years of rule by Bashar al Assad and before that his father Harviz al-Assad.

And really that has left the country with a judicial system that is

not very well equipped to deal with these sorts of crimes.

There is no crimes against humanity or war crimes on the Syrian statute book.

Legislation around things like command responsibility and indirect responsibility for crimes is also quite weak.

So they are being tried under essentially Syrian criminal law and that makes it difficult to get them in court on some of the more serious crimes.

There's a few reasons.

One, he's a first cousin of Bashar al-Assad.

He was captured in a raid in January twenty twenty-five, and he's probably the most senior official from Bashar's regime currently in the custody of the new Syrian government.

But I also think his involvement in Dera, which is a city where really the Syrian revolution and these protests that he is alleged to have repressed are what kick started the whole revolution that turned into fifteen years of civil war.

So Atif Najib is the face of that very early, very callous repression.

He's a name that every Syrian knows.

So there's an element of symbolism.

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