There were highly charged scenes as former senior regime official, Atef Najib, appeared before a Damascus court.
Formerly sentenced to death, Judge al-Aryan now oversees trial, but transitional justice still far from complete.
The first public trial in Syria of officials linked to the rule of former President Bashar al-Assad opened in Damascus on Sunday. Atef Najib, a former Syrian army brigadier general who was head of the Political Security Branch in southern Syria’s Daraa province under Assad, and who is also a cousin of the former president, appeared in the courtroom to face charges related to “crimes against the Syrian people,” the state-run news agency SANA reported. Najib was in that position in 2011 when...