Dutch court sentences Syrian man to 26 years for Assad-era torture

A Dutch court in The Hague sentenced a Syrian man identified in Dutch reporting as Rafik A. to 26 years in prison for crimes against humanity, finding that he tortured and raped imprisoned opponents of Bashar al-Assad’s government during the Syrian civil war. Prosecutors said the 57-year-old, who lived in Druten, served as the head interrogator for the pro-regime National Defence Forces and helped carry out abuse in 2013 and 2014.

The case centered on 25 alleged offenses against nine victims, including two women, and prosecutors said the violence included beatings, kicking, binding, electric shocks, humiliation and rape. One witness told the court that about 100 detainees were held in a boathouse or farm building in multiple rooms, and said the defendant led interrogation sessions in which violence was used to force confessions. Prosecutors had sought a 30-year sentence.

Authorities said Rafik A. moved to the Netherlands in 2021 and lived in Druten from 2022. He was arrested there in December 2023 after a tip from a human-rights lawyer and the Dutch police unit Team Internationale Misdrijven, which handles international crimes investigations. He can appeal the verdict, leaving the process unfinished even as the judgment stands as one of the Netherlands’ most serious Syria-linked torture convictions.

The sentence lands in a wider European pattern of using universal jurisdiction to pursue Assad-era abuses after international mechanisms stalled. In January 2022, a German court in Frankfurt sentenced former Syrian intelligence colonel Anwar Raslan to life in prison for crimes against humanity, including murder, rape and sexual assault at the Al-Khatib detention center. In May 2024, a French court gave life sentences to three senior Syrian officials in the Mazen and Patrick Dabbagh case, a ruling the family’s lawyer called historic.

The Hague has also moved before. In January 2024, a Dutch court sentenced former pro-Assad militia commander Mustafa A. to 12 years in prison for war crimes and complicity in torture, the first such case in the Netherlands against an Assad-regime associate. Dutch police have said The Hague is the only Dutch court handling these kinds of international crimes cases.

The broader record is vast. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria has said arbitrary detention, torture and sexual violence were widespread, and the war that began in 2011 has killed nearly half a million people. For survivors, each conviction does more than punish one man: it keeps alive the possibility that years after the cells emptied, courts can still name the machinery of abuse and hold it to account.