Why do they do this? We know it’s hollow. He could land in France right now and he’s not getting arrested or hindered.
Trial in absentia is a thing in most countries including France.
Right, but nobody actually believes that he’d be arrested or held. It’s all talk. They would never arrest the president of another country
Correct, that’s actually illegal and casus belli.
But this warrant is kind of a way of saying “don’t visit.” Public shaming like this is actually fairly meaningful to an iron fist dictator who can’t afford for his authority to be challenged.
It’s show. But show is a thing.
Correct, it’s just saying they’re really upset.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
PARIS, Nov 15 (Reuters) - French judges have issued arrest warrants for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher al-Assad, and two other senior officials over the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, a judicial source said on Wednesday.
It is the first international arrest warrant that has been issued for the Syrian head of state, whose forces responded to protests that began in 2011 with a brutal crackdown that U.N. experts have said amounts to war crimes.
These are also the first international arrest warrants that have been issued over the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, said Mazen Darwish, lawyer and founder of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), which filed the case in France.
Assad was shunned for more than a decade by most countries in the region and the rest of the world, with a few rare trips to Russia and Iran since the war broke out in 2011.
Warrants were issued to Ghassam Abbas, director of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre (SSRC), the agency that established Syria’s chemical weapons programme, and Bassam al-Hassan, chief of security and liaison officer.
In October, French judges issued warrants for two former defence ministers over a 2017 bomb that killed a French-Syrian man at his home in Daraa.
The original article contains 525 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Excuse me - I need to go draw up a death warrant for Adolf Hitler - apparently this would mean something.
