Syrian authorities have vowed to cooperate with European countries investigating war crimes and grave violations committed under Bashar al-Assad, pledging to publish a list of 1,000 individuals wanted for crimes during the former president's rule as states including Sweden move against suspected perpetrators on their soil.
Damascus is "prepared to provide the necessary facilities for European investigators wishing to collect evidence inside Syrian territory , including access to documents, witnesses, crime scenes, and other information, Interior Ministry spokesman Noureddine al-Baba told Sweden's Sveriges Radio earlier this week .
Their involvement "could contribute to prosecuting those accused of committing violations during the years of the Syrian revolution".
Al-Baba said a large portion of the archives belonging to the former regime's security agencies and military units remains intact, adding that authorities would soon publish a list of around 1,000 individuals wanted by the state, who reportedly include former officers and officials linked to the ousted Assad leadership.
Officials and some investigators hope such archives could help document violations and bring accountability not only to the individuals who perpetrated crimes but also to the institutions that backed them.
Access to these records would represent a major step in Syria's transitional justice process , Syrian state news agency SANA reported, particularly now that previous obstacles to accessing and investigating such crimes have been lifted with the fall of the regime.
The latest developments come amid efforts by the new government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa to hold to account key perpetrators of the brutal civil war in Syria, which killed more than 580,000 people, according to conservative UN estimates.
On 30 April this year, Damascus began the trial of former senior Assad-era official – and the ex-leader's cousin – Atef Najib , who faces 10 charges related to overseeing a violent crackdown during the 2011 uprising. Sweden spearheads universal jurisdiction push Damascus’s offer of cooperation coincides with an uptick in European investigations into war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Syria , based on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows serious international crimes to be prosecuted regardless of where they were committed or the nationality of the suspects.
Sweden is among the countries probing alleged perpetrators who later settled in Europe.
The investigative radio programme Kaliber on Sweden's public broadcaster recently identified 15 former militiamen and soldiers loyal to Assad who had been granted residence permits in Sweden, in cooperation with Swedish police and the national prosecution office.
The programme interviewed witnesses in Sweden and in Damascus who described living in fear of militiamen accused of murder, rape and kidnappings.
One of the men identified is believed to have committed crimes in the Yarmouk district of southern Damascus, including kidnapping civilians to extort ransom payments from their relatives.
The alleged militiaman is said to have reached Sweden in 2015, when the country still had a relatively flexible refugee policy compared to much of Europe, before moving to a small town and taking up a job at a fast-food restaurant. He has denied the accusations against him.
Reena Devgun, a prosecutor specialising in war crimes, said events in Syria remained difficult to investigate.
"It's about crimes committed abroad. Very often the evidence is not available in Sweden; just setting up a roadblock during an armed conflict is not punishable," she said. "But we have to prove the punishable acts that happened there and then, so it's challenging. But we're working on it."
In May this year, a Swedish court in Solna, just outside the capital Stockholm, convicted a pro-Assad Palestinian-Syrian national with Swedish citizenship on two counts of war crimes for his role in the shelling of a peaceful protest against Assad on 13 July 2012.
He was found to have been directly involved in the deadly incident in which several people were killed and wounded, as well as arresting civilians at checkpoints between 2012 and 2013 before handing them over to Syrian authorities, where they were tortured and some killed. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.