The International Court has issued an arrest warrant for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and three other people.
Human rights activists filed a lawsuit: Assad, his brother Maher and two Syrian generals are accused of crimes against humanity. An international arrest warrant for all four was issued by a court in France on charges of using chemical weapons against civilians.
In August 2013, more than 1,000 people were killed as a result of the use of sarin gas in the city of Douma and the Eastern Ghouta region, reminds euronews.
“This is the first time an international arrest warrant has been issued in connection with the use of chemical weapons in Ghouta in 2013,” emphasizes Mazen Darwish, a lawyer and founder of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), which filed the lawsuit in the French court. For the first time, an international arrest warrant has been issued against the head of the Syrian state, who responded to the protests that began in his country in 2011 with a brutal crackdown. The UN has equated the actions of the Assad regime to war crimes, writes dw.
Syria denies using chemical weapons, but a previous joint investigation by the UN and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found that the Syrian government used the nerve gas sarin in March 2017. In addition, according to the Investigation and Identification Unit (IIT) of the OPCW, Syrian government forces used chlorine as a weapon several times during the civil war.
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