The fight for justice for civilians allegedly killed by the Syrian government starts in court, using the ‘Caesar files’.
About 27,000 photos of dead and tortured civilian detainees were smuggled out of Syrian government secret archives by a military defector codenamed “Caesar” and made public in 2014. They were presented to the United Nations as evidence of the Bashar al-Assad regime’s killing of 11,000 civilian detainees in a single region between March 2011 and August 2013. After the search for justice failed to produce any prosecutions, victims’ families turned to the courts in Europe.
This two-part documentary series, The Lost Souls of Syria, follows two cases for more than five years – one in Spain, where a woman identifies her brother as one of the bodies from Caesar’s photos, and another in France, where a dual national helps his lawyer investigate the disappearance of his brother and nephew. The film includes testimony from Caesar and his accomplice, “Sami”.