The Inevitable Sequel: Syrian Court Sentences an Empty Chair to Death
In a masterclass of performative jurisprudence, the latest geopolitical reboot features the classic tropes of a dusty courtroom, a sternly worded piece of paper, and a comfortable dacha in the Moscow suburbs.
A Syrian court has sentenced former president Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia. Our foreign correspondent reviews this latest exercise in performative jurisprudence, noting that while the paperwork is immaculate, the dramatic pacing of prosecuting an empty chair leaves much to be desired.
There is a uniquely depressing choreography to the twilight years of the modern autocrat, a predictable sequence of events that plays out with the tired inevitability of a provincial pantomime. The regime collapses, the strongman scurries onto a heavily laden cargo plane under the cover of darkness, and several months later, a hastily convened tribunal gathers in a draughty room to furiously sentence a piece of wooden furniture to death. It is the geopolitical equivalent of a legacy sequel: nobody asked for it, everyone knows the ending, and the special effects are frankly embarrassing.
This week, the Syrian justice system, demonstrating a touching faith in the power of the subjunctive mood, formally sentenced former president Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia for war crimes. The defendant, currently enjoying the bleak, snowy anonymity of a Russian exile, was naturally unable to attend. He was, presumably, otherwise engaged in the traditional pursuits of the deposed despot: wandering around a heavily guarded dacha in a dressing gown, shouting at the television, and drafting a deeply delusional memoir that will eventually be self-published in an edition of fifty.
The Aesthetics of the Void
To observe the machinery of international justice grinding its gears against a total vacuum is to watch a very earnest, very expensive avant-garde play. The staging in Damascus was strictly strictly adhering to genre conventions. There was the cavernous, slightly dusty courtroom. There was the judge, a man carrying the weight of a decimated nation on his shoulders, clearing his throat to address a room largely devoid of the person who actually caused the decimation. And there, in the centre, was the star of the show: The Empty Chair.
It was a sturdy piece of carpentry, mahogany perhaps, upholstered in a sensible, stain-resistant fabric. It sat there, absorbing the searing indictments of a decade of unimaginable brutality with stoic, polished indifference. One could not help but admire its composure under cross-examination.
The British approach, of course, was always to send a gunboat. Now we send a PDF. It uses less diesel, but the dramatic pacing is severely compromised.
"The 'in absentia' verdict is a fascinating psychological mechanism," explains Dr. Arbuthnot Vance, Senior Fellow at the Geneva Institute for Performative Jurisprudence. "It allows a society to legally process its trauma without the logistical inconvenience of actually capturing the perpetrator. It is, fundamentally, the legal equivalent of winning an argument in the shower hours after the other person has left the building. Satisfying in the moment, but utterly devoid of practical consequence."
Dr. Vance notes that the legal framework for trying men who are two thousand miles away has become a booming industry. "We have developed an entire bureaucracy dedicated to sternly worded irrelevancies. We issue Interpol Red Notices, which have evolved from instruments of global law enforcement into something resembling very aggressive spam email. They sit in the 'Junk' folders of border agencies worldwide, silently declaring that a man who never intends to leave the Moscow suburbs is theoretically forbidden from holidaying in the Algarve."
A Well-Worn Path to the Dacha
History, as ever, declines to take notes. We have seen this franchise before, and the script rarely deviates. Idi Amin took his atrocities to a comfortable villa in Jeddah, spending his twilight years swimming laps and eating imported cheese while warrants for his arrest piled up like unread newspapers. Mobutu Sese Seko found the climate of Morocco far more agreeable than the courtroom docks of Kinshasa. The deposed dictator in exile is a foundational trope of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a reminder that while the arc of the moral universe is supposedly long, it frequently bends toward a gated compound with a reliable heating system.
"The Russian exile is a particularly rigid subgenre," notes Honoria Fallow, author of Dictators in Winter: A Guide to Soft Landings. "The aesthetic is always the same. There is the initial flurry of defiance, the gradual realization that the phone has stopped ringing, and finally, the descent into obscure hobbies. I give it six months before Assad develops a passionate, all-consuming interest in competitive pigeon fancying or the cultivation of prize-winning root vegetables."
In Moscow, the official response to the Syrian court's death sentence has been a resounding, bureaucratic shrug. The Kremlin has long maintained a sort of 'Lost and Found' box for disgraced authoritarians, provided they can pay the rent and do not complain too loudly about the quality of the borscht. To hand over a guest to an angry tribunal would be a terrible breach of this unspoken hospitality. The death sentence, therefore, remains purely conceptual, a piece of paper shouting into a blizzard.
Executing the Concept
This raises the delicate, almost farcical question of enforcement. Having sentenced a man in absentia, how does a state go about executing him in absentia?
"It requires a certain level of bureaucratic creativity," says Sir Geoffrey Vance, a retired British diplomat who spent thirty years filing meaningless protests against foreign atrocities. "One cannot simply hang a portrait of the man, though I believe the French tried something similar in the fourteenth century with a pig. Generally, the execution of the sentence is reduced to a furious administrative update. A junior clerk will log onto the national registry, locate the former president's file, and decisively click 'Deceased.' It is an appropriately hollow climax to a hollow performance."
Sources within the Syrian legal system suggest that a special committee has been formed to determine the exact nature of this phantom execution. Proposals reportedly include solemnly feeding a printed copy of his Wikipedia biography into a heavy-duty shredder, or perhaps formally expelling him from a local country club he has not visited since 2011. Whatever the chosen method, officials are confident that it will send a very strong message to the furniture standing in for him.
Ultimately, the ritual serves the living, not the dead, and certainly not the safely exiled. It is an exercise in papering over the abyss, a desperate attempt to impose the neat, structured logic of the courtroom upon the sprawling, senseless chaos of the last decade. It offers the comforting illusion that actions have consequences, that the scales of justice can be balanced, even if one side of the scale is currently residing in a fortified dacha drinking imported tea.
As the final gavel falls in Damascus, echoing across the empty benches and the vacant mahogany chair, one is left with a profound sense of exhaustion. The paperwork has been filed. The statements have been made. The void has been severely reprimanded. And somewhere in the Russian snow, a television is turned up slightly louder, drowning out the faint, persistent noise of a world trying, and failing, to hold the past to account.
