Commentary: Human dignity and the dead in the Caesar photographs
On the evening of October 31, I walked into a Hong Kong hotel seeking food and was confronted with a shining white skull—artificial, but startlingly realistic. It was, of course, decoration for Halloween, the night when certain traditions say spirits rise from graves and cavort in the world. From apparently pagan roots, Halloween in various countries has become a festival, a commercial celebration, a costume party, a time to watch horror movies: in other words, fun.
It is a testament to the ability of humans to compartmentalize that when we see a skull on a reception desk we smile but we demand that photographs of the dead are handled with the utmost discretion. Consider the issue of the Caesar photographs. In 2014 a Syrian military police photographer, given the cover name “Caesar,” managed to leave Syria, bringing with him on a computer thumb drive 53,275 images of approximately 11,000 dead bodies of people tortured and killed while in Syrian military detention. He told a three-person Inquiry of eminent jurists that the reasons he was ordered to take the photographs were “[f]irst to permit a death certificate to be produced without families requiring to see the body thereby avoiding the authorities having to give a truthful account of their deaths; second to confirm that orders to execute individuals had been carried out.” At that time of the Inquiry’s report, the photographs were entrusted to the “Syrian National Movement.” https://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1390226674736/syria-report-execution-tort.pdf
On 21 September 2017, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and a number of Syrians called the “Caesar Files Group” filed a criminal complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor in Karlsruhe against senior officials from the Syrian intelligence services and the military police for crimes against humanity and war crimes. The Group gave the Prosecutor “a set of high-resolution images and metadata” that “can be used to verify the photographs and provide further information about them. This adds to the evidentiary value of the images and paves the way for further investigatory steps.” In June 2018, the “German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) issued an international warrant against Jamil Hassan on the basis of the so-called Caesar Files, their metadata as well as witness statements by Syrian torture survivors. Hassan was the head of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Service until July 2019 and therefore responsible for torture in thousands of cases.” https://www.ecchr.eu/en/case/caesar-photos-document-systematic-torture/
Meanwhile, the nongovernmental Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) obtained “about 6,189 Caesar photographs” and is working to determine the identity of the people photographed (the images have only numbers, not names). So far SNHR has identified 801 persons, including 2 children and 10 adult females. It decided not to publish the photos it has because, it wrote, this “would involve many violations, perhaps the most prominent of which is the violation of victims’ and family members’ privacy . . the publication of such distressing photos may cause further trauma and pain to the tens of thousands of families whose children are still forcibly disappeared. In addition to this, most of these graphic photos of individuals killed under torture contain shocking and distressing scenes and we believe that disseminating them without very good cause is a violation of human dignity.” http://sn4hr.org/blog/2019/10/21/54362/
Atrocity photographs are, unfortunately, increasingly common, from videos of Islamic State murders published on line to images of police brutality captured by cellphone cameras. They are important as potential legal evidence, for resolving the fates of persons, and for the history of the event and the human community. Some of them are public immediately, such as the images broadcast by the gunman who killed two people and injured two more in Halle, Germany (see below). But managing the records of undisclosed atrocity photographs such as those Caesar had requires a sensitive, serious consideration of their impact when made public, the privacy rights of the families of the persons pictured, and the need to show the public the evidence of crimes. Surely if it is possible to bring closure to a family by making the photos available to the family for review while protecting their privacy, that is the just course of action, while denying access to the general public. SNHR and others who hold such archives have a most serious responsibility when they grant access.