How to Make Life Difficult for War Criminals

Ibrahim Olabi is a British lawyer of Syrian origin. He had always intended to pursue a career in commercial law. However, as Olabi says, fate had other plans. The war in Syria broke out in 2011. He immediately switched gears to studying criminal law and human rights advocacy in order to help Syrians. This particular conflict has become his life's work for the past decade. In his legal work, he has almost exclusively focused on this war. He has only made an exception for Ukraine since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion. "What Russia is trying to do in Ukraine, it has already done in Syria," Olabi is convinced, seeing the same warfighting strategy on the part of the Kremlin. He heads the legal team of the war crimes documentation initiative The Reckoning Project. In April 2024, the project team and a witness from Ukraine filed a criminal complaint for torture by the Russians with the Federal Court of Argentina.   Journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk speaks with Ibrahim Olabi about the choice of Argentina as the venue for the lawsuit, about Russia's identical "playbook" for waging war, how Syrians are trying to achieve justice, and how to make life difficult for war criminals.