Despite the empty box, despite the absence of the three defendants and their wish not to be represented by lawyers, the guilty verdict handed down by the Paris Criminal Court on Friday, May 24, was historic. Never before have such senior figures in Syria's repressive system been put on trial.

The court sentenced Ali Mamlouk (former head of the National Security Bureau, Syria's highest intelligence authority, and current special adviser to President Bashar al-Assad), Jamil Hassan (former director of the feared Air Force Intelligence Directorate) and Abdel Salam Mahmoud (former director of the directorate's investigation branch) to life imprisonment for complicity in crimes against humanity and complicity in war crimes. The Paris Criminal Court also ordered that the international arrest warrants for the three men, who still live in Syria, remain in effect.

The three men were on trial for their responsibility in the forced disappearance, kidnapping, torture and death of Mazen and Patrick Dabbagh, a father and son both of French-Syrian nationality, in Damascus between 2013 and 2018. They were also judged for the confiscation of the family home in 2016, from which Mazen's wife and daughter were forcibly evicted following expropriation by a military court.

At the end of the hearing, the room, filled with Syrian refugees and activists, gave the court a long round of applause. Everyone hugged their neighbor and congratulated Obaida and Hanan Dabbagh, plaintiffs in the trial, respectively the brother and sister-in-law of Mazen Dabbagh, as well as Mazen Darwish, a Syrian lawyer and human rights activist who contributed greatly to the establishment of judicial files with his organization, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM).

The court followed the recommendations of the public prosecutor, Céline Viguier, who had argued that life imprisonment was the "only possible sentence," citing "extremely serious acts" bordering on "barbarism" and having caused "extraordinary suffering." She argued that, despite the scant information presented on their personalities during the hearing, Mamlouk, Hassan and Mahmoud were – and still are, at least for the first and last of them – "essential links" in the repressive system in Syria, of which, "like [Assad], they are the architects." "Your decision will be part of the fight against impunity," she told the jury of three Criminal Court magistrates – in the absence of defendants, the six citizen jurors were not summoned – before they retired to deliberate under the presidency of Laurent Raviot, attentive and focused throughout the hearing.

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