Justice without return? Rethinking transitional justice and return in post-Assad Syria

 Iliana Moridou

Photo by Ahmed Akacha on Pexels

How many times have we heard phrases such as “send them back” or “they can now go back” since the fall of Assad on 8 December 2024? Whether on social media, national television, or by European politicians suspending Syrian asylum proceedings, debates surrounding Syrian return have become ubiquitous across Europe. 

The logic appears straightforward: with the Assad regime officially ousted and a political transition seemingly underway, the conditions that had forced 12 million Syrians into exile during the Syrian Civil War appear to have disappeared. If a conflict has ended, does that not automatically suggest that refugees are able to return home and that the transition to peace has been successful? 

Transitional justice would traditionally argue so. Transitional justice was conceived as the dominant framework to address mass atrocities and human rights violations after conflict through trials, truth commissions and reparations. It largely assesses its own success by whether a state has become stable and functional enough to peacefully govern its citizens again. Refugee return is treated as the clearest sign that this has happened and that the political community of a nation-state has been restored. This means that transitional justice sees displacement as a temporary byproduct of conflict that will be resolved by the transition to peace, rather than as an enduring harm that requires its own recognition and redress.  

The Syrian case, however, reveals the limits of this assumption. More than a year after Assad’s fall, Syria’s transition is indeed underway. The interim government has embarked on the long process of transitional justice, and roughly 1.5 million formerly displaced Syrians have returned since December 2024. Yet, over 16 million Syrians remain in acute humanitarian need and the conditions for safe, voluntary and dignified return are far from met. This gap exposes displacement as more than a byproduct of conflict that is resolved once violence ends. It is a constitutive feature of conflict, producing enduring harms that persist even after a transition is formally underway. If transitional justice continues to treat return as a measure of success, it overlooks that return is neither the only path to justice, nor a guarantee that it has occurred. 

How we define displacement shapes what we think justice requires. Defining refugees primarily through the lens of physical displacement implies that justice will be found in physical return. If exile is treated as a temporary displacement  from a territorial home, then home is where justice happens. The definition of displacement shapes the definition of harm, which in turn shapes what counts as repair and redress. 

For many Syrians, return is not a straightforward homecoming. Entire neighbourhoods in cities such as Homs or Aleppo remain in ruins. Others have found their homes occupied by other displaced families or discovered that property records were destroyed or manipulated during the war, making it almost impossible to reclaim what they owned. Additionally, for many, displacement has not been a linear process. A large number of refugees who sought asylum in Lebanon or Turkey were displaced again within those host countries. Others were displaced multiple times inside Syria itself, forced from one region to another as front lines shifted throughout the war and since Assad’s fall. In other words, returning does not mean going back to the life they left behind. 

This reality challenges the assumption that return is what makes justice possible. Some of the most significant accountability efforts for crimes committed in Syria have taken place outside of the country entirely and while Syrians were still displaced. For instance, survivors and witnesses who fled Syria gathered evidence, testified and stood trial in European courts for years before any transition was possible in Syria. Since 2019, German courts have prosecuted former Syrian officials under universal jurisdiction, beginning with the landmark Al-Khatib trial, while similar cases have since followed in France and Sweden. Even as the first war crime trials are beginning inside Syria, prosecutions in Europe continue at pace.  

The same is true for truth-telling and memorialisation. Rather than waiting for the conflict to end, Syrians in exile have documented abuses, preserved evidence, and created spaces of remembrance. The Syrian Archive, for instance, was founded by exiled Syrian activists based in Berlin, who have spent years verifying and preserving evidence of human rights violations that has since been used in legal proceedings across Europe. Another example are the Caesar Files, a collection of tens of thousands of photographs smuggled out of Syria by a military defector and later used as evidence in trials and as a traveling exhibition, years before any political transition began. 

Return, then, is neither necessary nor sufficient for justice. It is not necessary because accountability, truth-telling, and evidence-gathering can and is happening in exile. It is not sufficient because for those who do return, the harms of displacement, such as ruined homes, lost property and repeated uprooting, persist long after crossing the border back home. Justice can be pursued across borders, before conflict has fully ended and without requiring displaced people to return. Recognising this means seeing displacement not as a side effect of conflict but as one of its central harms that transitional justice must address more directly.

Iliana Moridou

Iliana is a researcher specialising in dealing with the past mechanisms and post-conflict governance in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. An alumna of the London School of Economics, her work focuses on diasporic transitional and restorative justice processes in contexts of ongoing and protracted transitions. She has worked with multiple international NGOs, combining grassroots engagement with policy-oriented research.