CEHRI and the Open Society Justice Initiative welcome the start of a trial against five officials from Austria’s civilian security-intelligence agency after an investigation revealed that they executed a plan to conceal a former senior Syrian official suspected of crimes against humanity in Austria.
We argue that the court should provide victims of Syrian state-sponsored torture with the opportunity to testify on the harm caused by officials at the agency then known as the BVT—now Austria’s Directorate of State Security and Intelligence—accused of transporting and providing protection to former Syrian Brigadier Khaled Al-Halabi and obstructing the criminal investigation into his crimes.
Halabi, who arrived in Austria in 2015, is currently under investigation by the Vienna Public Prosecutor for crimes against humanity but has not yet been indicted. He has been accused of supervising torture and other crimes while overseeing a detention facility in Raqqa from 2009 until 2013 and is the highest-ranking former Syrian intelligence officer known to be in Europe. CEHRI and the Justice Initiative jointly represent 18 Syrian victims of torture in the criminal investigation into Halabi and have called on the Austrian government to expedite its efforts to prosecute suspects for war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Syrian conflict.
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