SHAPPAL IBRAHIM knew they were coming for him. As soon as the Syrian security forces began repressing anti-government protests he had helped to organise in the spring of 2011, the Kurdish activist went underground. But the goons soon caught up with him. What followed was nearly two years of horror, most of it in Saydnaya, a notorious military prison outside Damascus. “They made me stand naked in my cell for hours, beat me and tortured me with electric shocks,” he says. “There was never enough to eat, and only three or four hours of sleep a night.”

Unlike countless others, Mr Ibrahim made it out: he was released as part of an amnesty in May 2013 and fled to Germany via Iraqi Kurdistan. Along with other Syrians who suffered a similar fate, he has now offered to testify to the office of Germany’s federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe, in the hope that his torturers will one day face justice in German courts. Working with the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), a pressure group in Berlin, and Anwar al-Bounni and Mazen Darwish, two lawyers who spent years in Syrian prisons before escaping to Germany, the refugees have lodged criminal complaints against several high-level officials for crimes against humanity. Their statements are adding to a stack of evidence that prosecutors began compiling in 2011. At first, the investigation looked into violence against peaceful protesters. Later, they started looking at war crimes and opened a separate file for crimes committed by so-called Islamic State (IS).

Mr Ibrahim and his fellow activists are turning to the German judiciary because there is little chance that their torturers will be prosecuted elsewhere. The justice system in Syria is run by the people who tortured them. Syria is not party to the International Criminal Court (ICC), and a UN Security Council resolution that would have given the ICC a mandate to investigate war crimes in the country was blocked by China and Russia in 2014. German authorities have assumed the mandate to prosecute based on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which holds that a state may act in the most serious crimes against international law even if neither the perpetrator nor the victim is a national of that state. Germany has some of the best-developed institutions in the world for investigating and prosecuting such crimes, including a specialised war-crimes unit.

Even so, the chances of getting justice remain slim. German law does not provide for trial in absentia, and most of the accused wisely do not travel outside Syria. Even where a defendant can be tracked down, proving responsibility for crimes that took place thousands of miles away is difficult. Some of those who should really be tried for war crimes wind up with a terrorism conviction instead. That happens both because authorities tend to be more worried about active terrorists than about war criminals, and also because it is easier to prove that someone joined a terrorist organisation than that he ordered or took part in torture. Only a handful of Syrian war-crimes cases, all involving small-time members of IS or anti-government militias (some of whom are German citizens), have so far made it to trial, though a further 30 or so may soon do so.

The witnesses and their lawyers hope that some bigwigs will eventually be caught. For now, they know their work is of largely symbolic value. One aim is to keep the issue in the public eye and to prepare the ground for future prosecutions by the ICC or a special tribunal, if geopolitics changes in a way that allows this, says Alexandra Lily Kather, a legal adviser at the ECCHR. Mr al-Bounni adds that he wants the torturers not to feel safe. “And we want to tell our friends who are still in prison that they shouldn’t give up hope.”