The authors of a newly released report on torture in Syria have compared the evidence they received to a “Nazi archive”, as talks between the Syrian opposition and the government are set to begin in Geneva.
Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, former lead prosecutor of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, said,
“It was like getting the keys to the Nazi archive”.
Nice went on to state that the amount of evidence received, 55,000 photos of around 11,000 prisoners who had been killed was massive, noting it was “an enormous amount of material in one go”.
His comments were echoed by fellow report investigator, David Crane, who had previously indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia at the Sierra Leone court. Crane commented that,
“It is very rare to have this kind of government-backed, industrial, machinelike, systematic torture and killing of human beings, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Nuremberg”.
See more from the New York Times here.
Their comments follow on from Sir Desmond de Silva QC’s remarks, the final author of the report and former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone, where he compared the images that were compiled to a Nazi concentration camp.
Their remarks come as the Geneva II peace conference opened today, with 40 or so foreign ministers expected to speak.