Ambassador Rapp discusses the need for CIJA’s battlefield investigations in The Syria Trials Podcast: Innovation
CIJA’s Commissioner Ambassador Rapp and Fritz Streiff discuss the need for CIJA’s battlefield investigation in Syria and its importance in securing justice in the Syria Trials Podcast (S1:E10) on Innovations in international criminal justice for Syria. They discuss how CIJA was able to access evidence in areas of Syria that had fallen to the moderate opposition, including Aleppo and Idlib, showing how NGOs can conduct battlefield investigations and how the Syrian regime and its security agencies abandoned 1000’s of pages of incriminating documents. CIJA’s Syrian investigators were able to meticulously collect, store and move these materials to secure locations to be processed, preserved and archived: “a lot of this material would have ended up being burned to stay warm in the winter” says Ambassador Rapp. But more than 1 million pages were collected, preserved and analysed, contributing to several criminal trials, including the unlawful killing verdict of US journalist Marie Colvin by the US District Court in a case brought by the Center for Justice and Accountability, which Streiff acknowledges was “the first judgement in open court that heavily relied on documents and legal analysis provided by CIJA.”
