On March 13, 2013, Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan, a judge at Idlib’s Civil Court of Appeal, publicly defected from the Syrian regime – an act that led him to be sentenced to death in absentia.

In December 2024, more than a decade later, Bashar al-Assad’s regime – the very one he had defected from – was overthrown, and al-Aryan was able to finally return to Syria’s judiciary.

In the latest step on al-Aryan’s journey from defection to exile to return, he was the presiding judge on Sunday at the opening of the trial of Atef Najib, a cousin of former President al-Assad and the former head of political security in the southern province of Deraa who faces charges of premeditated murder, torture leading to death and crimes against humanity.

Al-Assad and his brother Maher al-Assad, a former top military commander, are also being tried in absentia. Both men fled to Russia after their 2024 overthrow.

Fadel Abdulghany, the founder of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), told Al Jazeera that the moment carries deep symbolic weight.

“A judge once sentenced to death by the Assad regime for defending the rule of law has returned to the bench to apply that same law to one of the regime’s most extensively documented perpetrators of violations,” Abdulghany explained. “This reversal of power dynamics reflects the promise of the rule of law so rarely fulfilled in post-authoritarian transitions. The significance of this moment lies not in spectacle but in its adherence to due process.”

Defection and return

Al-Aryan was a judicial adviser during the early years of Syria’s uprising, which began in March 2011, as protests intensified and the state increasingly relied on security-based rule.

By 2013, he decided that he had to break from the Syrian state and defected in a recorded statement that framed his decision as a matter of legal and moral responsibility.

“In light of the responsibility placed on the shoulders of judges, who are the guardians of justice and truth, and as a result of the massacres committed by the regime against civilians, children and women, … I announce my defection from the Ministry of Justice and my joining the Independent Syrian Judicial Council … to be a strong shield for justice and equality,” he said in the video.

After his defection, al-Aryan joined the judicial bodies of the then-Syrian Interim Government and became involved in building what was described as a parallel judicial track in opposition-held areas.

As part of that, he worked on establishing alternative courts, handling legal cases and documenting alleged crimes committed by the now former regime.

In response, the authorities sentenced al-Aryan to death in absentia and confiscated his property, including assets later sold at public auction.

After the fall of al-Assad’s regime, al-Aryan’s name re-emerged in June after a presidential decree reinstating dismissed judges. That process culminated in his appointment as head of the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus, positioning him at the centre of the country’s first transitional judicial proceedings.

Najib’s links to repression of Syrian revolution

The transformation in al-Aryan’s life mirrors that of the man on trial in his courtroom on Sunday.

The position of the al-Assad family member as a top security official in Deraa in 2011 placed Najib at the centre of some of the first major confrontations between civilians and state security officers. Deraa is called the “cradle of the revolution” after government repression of protesters there inspired al-Assad’s opponents in other areas of the country to rise up.

One specific incident – the arrest and torture of schoolchildren detained after scrawling, “The people want the fall of the regime,” and the killing of one of them, 13-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb – is widely regarded as the spark for the country’s revolution.

Najib’s connection to that incident and the death of Hamza is one of the reasons why his trial is so significant in Syria.

The former official was arrested in January 2025 in the Latakia region, where some former regime loyalists had taken refuge.

Transitional justice

For the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the trial is significant because of how it is being conducted and not just who is being tried.

Abdulghany stressed that “this is neither a revolutionary court nor a victors’ court” but a case that has moved through formal legal stages, including arrest by the Ministry of Interior, investigation, prosecution and referral to a criminal court in Damascus.

The charges include premeditated murder and torture leading to death, classified as crimes against humanity under international law. This framing, Abdulghany said, is deliberate: It places domestic proceedings within the framework of international criminal standards, which is essential for the credibility of any verdict.

Abdulghany also highlighted the institutional message of the trial and in particular the inclusion of the former president and his brother as defendants despite their absence from the proceedings and from Syria.

“Physical absence does not amount to legal immunity,” he said.

Despite this, Abdulghany stressed that the trial was not the end of the transitional justice process in a country where hundreds of thousands of people died and disappeared during the war and the five-decade rule of al-Assad and his father, Hafez. There is still little information in many of the cases of the disappeared and imprisoned. The SNHR has documented at least 177,000 cases of enforced disappearances since 2011 with the vast majority attributed to the former government.

Abdulghany explained that accountability in Syria cannot be reduced to criminal trials alone and instead must include four interconnected pillars: criminal accountability, truth-seeking, reparations and institutional reform.

These, he argued, must function together under a unified structure rather than as separate or sequential processes.

Abdulghany placed particular emphasis on institutional reform, noting that Syria’s judiciary was previously used as a tool of repression rather than justice.

“Without these reforms, transitional justice trials risk being conducted through judicial institutions that have not themselves been transformed,” he said, pointing to the need to dismantle exceptional courts and rebuild judicial independence.

Truth-seeking, he added, is equally essential.

Families of victims have a right to know what happened to their relatives, and this right exists independently of criminal prosecutions, Abdulghany said.

“They deserve answers,” he said, adding that recognition of truth, justice and reparations must be unconditional if any durable reconciliation is to be achieved.