Nate Berg writes:

Wolfgang Kaleck, a 60-year-old human rights lawyer with large blue eyes and a wave of sandy brown hair, smiles a lot for someone who has spent his life litigating some of the world’s worst atrocities. “The stories you hear you won’t forget,” he says, sitting at a long table in his office in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. “But at the same time you learn about these cruel facts of the world, you learn about the light side, which is that there’s resistance basically everywhere.” He should know: For the better part of three decades, he has pursued cases across borders on behalf of victims who have been disappeared by the military dictatorship in Argentina and spied upon by the East German Stasi. He has filed criminal complaints against former U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, and current Director Gina Haspel. And now he’s taking on one of the biggest bad guys of them all: Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.

Under charges brought by the German Federal Prosecutor, members of the Assad regime are being tried at a courthouse in Koblenz, a small city on the Rhine between Cologne and Frankfurt, for crimes against humanity. It is the first trial to target high-ranking officials involved in a war that Assad has been waging against his own people with impunity since an uprising against his regime exploded in 2011; his crackdown has claimed an estimated 400,000 Syrian lives. For victims of the regime and their family members, this courthouse is a world away from the conflict they left behind in Syria—but it’s also perhaps the best way to bring justice back to their homeland, which continues to be ground into dust by a conflict that has served as a proxy battle for a slew of outside forces.

The trial, which began in April, has been long in the making. Far beyond the courthouse, through years’ worth of gathered documents and victim interviews and cross-cultural legal exchange, Wolfgang Kaleck has worked to make this attempt at justice. A German human rights lawyer with uncommon dedication and persistence, he is the main reason such a trial is even possible. [Continue reading…]