Who should hold Syria’s evidence?

In late May 2026, Syria’s National Commission for Missing Persons announced that it had reached corroborated conclusions, with a high degree of professional certainty, regarding the deaths of the six children of Rania al-Abbasi, who had been forcibly disappeared alongside their parents since March 2013. The Commission’s findings rested on material that reached it through an ad hoc bilateral arrangement: 29 video clips stored on a USB drive, transferred in Brussels by a Syrian human rights organisation and subjected to more than two weeks of forensic analysis in coordination with relevant Syrian authorities.

The route those materials took may appear unusual. In reality, however, no established mechanism exists. Large amounts of evidence essential to truth and accountability remain in the custody of civil society organisations outside Syria and reach Syrian institutions via arrangements negotiated case by case. No common framework governs the transfer of such material, defines the conditions under which it may be disclosed or regulates the necessary safeguards. The consequences can be dire when, for example, source-identifying information reaches state authorities without adequate redaction, or when breaks in the chain of custody undermine the evidentiary value of material in future judicial proceedings. What the al-Abbasi case brought into focus is the demand of families to learn about the fate of their relatives and the informal - and ultimately arbitrary - way in which evidence is handled. 

Neither international nor Syrian law provide general rules allocating proprietary title over conflict documentation held by civil society organisations. Ownership can therefore only be discussed as a moral or ethical question. Legally, the relevant issues concern custody and how it is exercised: confidentiality, consent, data protection, chain of custody, and the conditions under which disclosure is lawful. The majority of civil society organisations appear to understand their role as that of custodians acting under obligations toward sources, victims and future accountability processes. What’s missing is a shared custodial framework capable of replacing ad hoc arrangements with common principles. In the absence of those, duties that are widely recognised in principle are currently exercised through improvised bilateral arrangements. What worked in the case of the al-Abbasi disclosure is no suitable model for the tens of thousands of unresolved disappearances that lack comparable public attention.

What could a proper custodial framework look like? First of all, it must specify how responsibilities are allocated across the three institutional actors that currently make up Syria’s documentation landscape: civil society organisations, the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria (IIIM), and the institutions of the Syrian transitional state.

Any custodial framework has to reconcile four distinct interests. First is the right of victims and their families to truth, remedy, and reparation, reflected in UN General Assembly Resolution 60/147 (2005), the Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation. Although these obligations primarily bind states, they also weigh against the indefinite withholding of relevant information by any actor exercising custodial functions. Second is the fiduciary responsibility of organisations that collected documentation under commitments of confidentiality and source protection. Those obligations cannot simply be discharged through unconditional transfer to state authorities. Third is the broader public interest in preserving a coherent historical record of the conflict. Fourth is the need to safeguard evidentiary integrity for future judicial proceedings, including ongoing universal-jurisdiction cases in several European jurisdictions, where breaks in the chain of custody may affect admissibility.

These interests are complementary but not identical. None overrides the others, and none creates a unilateral entitlement to determine how documentation should be handled. A custodial framework must therefore be designed to balance them. Custodial responsibility differs from functional control because it is defined by duties rather than powers. Those exercising it must protect sources, preserve evidentiary integrity, respect confidentiality and facilitate lawful disclosure where this can be done safely. The IIIM’s dual-consent mechanism is the closest existing institutional expression of this requirement. Before material is disclosed, both the holding organisation and, where applicable, the original source must consent. Properly understood, this mechanism is a safeguard for the fiduciary duties attached to custody. A future custodial framework should build on that principle. Organisations should refuse disclosure only where doing so is necessary to fulfil their fiduciary responsibilities - for example, to protect sources or preserve evidentiary integrity. Such decisions should be reasoned, documented, and, where appropriate, subject to independent review, while source consent and witness protection remain decisive wherever disclosure would create foreseeable risks. 

The need for such a framework is illustrated by the al-Abbasi disclosure itself. The material reached Syrian authorities through a direct bilateral arrangement between a civil society organisation and the National Commission rather than through any structured institutional pathway that could provide independent assurance that fiduciary duties had been properly discharged. The framework outlined here seeks to fill that gap.

The model proposed here is deliberately staged. In the short term, the most workable architecture would build on an expanded NGO–IIIM framework, with the IIIM acting as an intermediary between civil society organisations and Syrian national institutions - a role it does not currently perform despite its legitimacy. Established by the UN General Assembly in 2016 after the Security Council failed to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court, it was mandated to collect, consolidate, preserve and analyse evidence and to prepare files for future criminal proceedings. Since then, it has become the principal international repository and coordinator for evidence relating to crimes committed in Syria. Organisations would continue to transfer sensitive documentation to the IIIM under existing protective cooperation arrangements. In consultation with the originating organisation, the IIIM would then determine which processed, aggregated, or de-identified material could safely be shared with Syrian authorities for truth-seeking purposes, while retaining the original documentation for future prosecutorial use.

In the longer term, however, the framework should evolve toward direct Syrian custodial capacity. That transition cannot be rushed. The safe receipt and management of sensitive conflict-era documentation requires legal, institutional and technical safeguards that do not yet exist, and transferring material prematurely undermines the very accountability processes these institutions are intended to support. As of now, Syria lacks a national witness-protection framework consistent with its obligations under the Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Secure infrastructure for receiving and storing sensitive documentation still needs to be developed. Whistleblower protections should be extended to conflict-era materials. Finally, judicial independence is still lacking, making independent oversight of a domestic custodial system essential, potentially drawing on the field presence of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and anchoring the framework’s core safeguards in international standards, with Syrian legislation serving as the implementing layer rather than the primary guarantee.

The IIIM’s intermediary role would require institutional precision. Its mandate under General Assembly Resolution 71/248 is to collect, consolidate, preserve and analyse evidence and prepare files for fair and independent criminal proceedings before competent jurisdictions. Since its first visit to Syria in December 2024, it has begun engaging directly with Syrian authorities, but it does not yet have a permanent operational presence or an established role comparable to the framework proposed here. Some forms of structured disclosure to Syrian institutions may already be compatible with the existing mandate, provided consent, confidentiality and fair-trial guarantees are respected. A more formal intermediary role, however, would require host-state consent, institutional arrangements with Syrian authorities, additional resources and sustained political backing from UN member states. Formalising the IIIM’s role in Syria would also provide an important accountability function. An intermediary that records what material is transferred, to whom and for what purpose, creates an institutional trail against which selective disclosure or selective prosecution becomes visible.

A workable custodial framework would clarify the obligations of each actor. Civil society organisations cannot discharge their fiduciary responsibilities by retaining documentation indefinitely. Syrian institutions have a legitimate public mandate to investigate, preserve historical records and provide answers to families - a mandate that does not depend on electoral legitimacy in the same way as the exercise of criminal jurisdiction. But a public mandate does not, by itself, create safe custodial capacity, and demanding the transfer of sensitive documentation before such capacity exists is not a serious institutional position. International mechanisms, meanwhile, cannot substitute for national accountability; but they can provide the institutional bridge over which documentation moves safely toward judicial proceedings, truth-seeking processes, families and the historical record while national capacities are being built.

Ultimately, the success of any custodial architecture will be measured by routine institutional practice. The transfer of documentation such as the al-Abbasi file should become a matter of established protocol rather than improvised bilateral arrangements. Only then will the families of Syria’s missing and forcibly disappeared have a predictable pathway to truth instead of depending on the visibility of individual cases or the discretion of particular organisations.