From O.J. Simpson to Atef Najib

The Syrian authorities have finally discovered televised courtroom proceedings. After half a century in which justice took place mainly in intelligence basements, behind closed doors and under portraits of the Dear Leader, the new government has decided that the judiciary should now be visible. 

Hence the broadcast trial of Atef Najib, cousin of Bashar al-Assad and one of the regime figures most associated with the torture of children in Daraa at the beginning of the Syrian uprising. Syrians were presented with a production: striped prison uniform, peculiar cage, solemn camera angles.

Cinema noticed long ago that courts are entertainment. The courtroom drama became its own genre, alongside horror, romance and thrillers. The heroes naturally duelled not with swords or machine guns, but with arguments, documents and rhetorical flourishes. The public enjoys justice best when it is staged.

Religions understood this too. The Qur’an says of punishment for adultery that “a group of believers should witness their punishment”, partly for deterrence and example. Another verse declares that “in retribution there is life”. Public punishment, public spectacle and public morality have always travelled together.

The 1995 O.J. Simpson trial transformed televised justice into global entertainment. More recently, Amber Heard and Johnny Depp turned divorce proceedings into internet comedy. The trial of the policeman who killed George Floyd became a worldwide morality play about race and policing. The twentieth century’s most famous proceedings, the Nuremberg trials, were themselves staged as civilisation’s answer to barbarism. Even Saddam Hussein’s trial became compulsory viewing across the Arab world, though often less from devotion to justice than from sectarian schadenfreude. Mohamed Morsi’s courtroom appearances acquired the same grim theatrical quality before his suspicious death in prison.

Under the Assads, however, Syria preferred a more minimalist approach to law. There was no public judiciary to speak of, apart from a radio programme titled The Rule of Justice. Not television, of course. Television implies visibility, and visibility is dangerous.

The actual Syrian judiciary was known simply as “the competent authorities”, which generally meant intelligence officers asking questions nobody dared answer incorrectly. Political trials took place either underground or in sealed courtrooms. Lawyers were absent, procedures theoretical. Even members of the Arab Writers Union reportedly hoped only that, if one of their colleagues was arrested for writing something unfortunate, two union representatives might be allowed to attend the interrogation. It rarely ever happened. 

Syrians can scarcely remember a televised trial during fifty years of Assad rule. There were brief exceptions. One involved alleged Muslim Brotherhood members in the late 1970s. Another followed the 2005 killing of the Kurdish cleric Sheikh Mashouq al-Khaznawi, when a judge appeared fleetingly to accuse the victim’s family of murdering him over an inheritance dispute. At another point, after Basil al-Assad visited Aleppo, a criminal was publicly executed and the city celebrated enthusiastically.

In Assad’s Syria, the president was the chief judge, the intelligence agencies were the judiciary, and criminal cases fermented in court corridors like forgotten shanklish (Syria’s answer to stinky French cheese.)

This matters because justice is not merely decoration. Muslim rulers and jurists said repeatedly that states survive disbelief but not injustice. Ali ibn Abi Talib supposedly remarked: “Rule may endure with unbelief, but not with oppression.” Ibn Taymiyya sharpened the point further: “God sustains a just state even if unbelieving, and destroys an unjust one even if Muslim”.

The principle sounds obvious enough. States begin collapsing when the law applies only to the weak. Syrians already worry that wealthy businessmen implicated in killing and corruption in the Assad years may escape punishment through compensation payments, influence or old friendships, while lesser figures become sacrificial examples for television audiences. Others defend this as political necessity: revolutions, they say, erase what came before.

Meanwhile, many ordinary Syrians remain deeply suspicious of courts altogether. Many became so exhausted by the expense, delay and bureaucracy of the legal system that they preferred local clerics, who could settle disputes in only one or two sittings.

Europe likes to represent justice as a blindfolded woman holding scales and a sword. The scales symbolise fairness, the blindfold impartiality, the sword the force required to impose judgment. Syria’s judicial emblem, by contrast, is simply the state eagle. 

American films increasingly favour black judges and prosecutors, turning them into familiar courtroom archetypes. Syrian cinema, like Arab cinema generally, rarely reflects reality so much as elite fantasies about reality. Most judges under Assad, incidentally, came from minority communities, though nobody watching Syrian television dramas would necessarily conclude that the judiciary existed at all.

Now the new authorities have decided that justice must not only be done, but broadcast in high definition.