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"Eight years after the onset of the [Syrian] civil war, international criminal justice has done little for Syria, but Syria has done a lot for international justice."1
Mark Kersten
I. INTRODUCTION
On 22 May 2014, three years after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, China and Russia vetoed a UN Security Council Resolution referring the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Seemingly angered by the vote, "the French Ambassador to the United Nations, Gérard Araud, described China's and Russia's [rejection of] the resolution as akin to 'vetoing justice.'"2 The resolution's defeat meant that those demanding accountability for atrocity crimes in Syria—including a sarin gas attack outside of Damascus in August 2013 that left more than 1,400 people dead—would have to pursue other options, none of which would be easy. One obvious option would be to set up a special tribunal for Syria, as the UN General Assembly had done in other war-torn countries—an idea that never gained traction.
Finally, in 2016, the UN General Assembly established the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) to collect, consolidate, preserve, and analyze evidence of violations of international humanitarian law committed by all sides in the Syria conflict.3 While not a prosecutorial body itself, the IIIM was mandated to prepare files on war crimes and other international crimes for future criminal proceedings. Now, three years later, the IIIM has amassed more than a million records of potential war crimes and received requests from twenty-three national war crimes units and judiciaries for assistance.4 European states, meanwhile, have individually invoked extraterritorial jurisdiction laws to investigate and prosecute more than twenty cases regarding war crimes in Syria. France and Germany, supported by the European Union agency known as Eurojust, even set up a joint investigation team to pursue Syrian suspects.5
But Syrian war crimes suspects are not the only ones being pursued in courts abroad. At the time of writing, more than a dozen national war crimes units—also referred to as specialized prosecution units—have been established across the world. The largest number of units are concentrated in Europe, Canada, and the United States. Many units were created in response to massive migration flows from conflict zones around the globe and employ a "no-safe-haven...