A case study of judicial resistance in northern Syria after the March revolution of 2011
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/1901Keywords:
Syria, lawyers, criminal justice system, authoritarianism, judiciary, resistanceAbstract
Judges and prosecutors challenged oppressive laws introduced by the regime of Bashar al-Asad to curb the popular uprising of March 2011 in Syria. When some members of the judiciary became targets of the regime’s security forces, they resigned from office and formed independent councils to administer justice in regions no longer under state control. This article focuses on the first independent council in northern Syria: the Free Syrian Judicial Council (FSJC). Unlike the majority of non-state courts and councils established by groups of armed resistance in Syria, the FSJC does not belong to the category of “insurgent/rebel justice”. Rather, members of the FSJC were engaged in a form of resistance called “judicial resistance”: the capacity of judicial officers to challenge oppressive laws in their decision-making. The article argues that even after they left office, judges and prosecutors of the FSJC were still engaged in judicial resistance: they did their best to uphold the rule of law and provide services to the population despite the breakdown of public order and the fragmentation of the non-state judicial system engendered by the armed conflict.
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