Around 15 years after a suicide car bomb in Beirut killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others on February 14, 2005, the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in Ayyash et al. convicted Salim Ayyash, an operative in the Iran-backed Lebanese Shi’ite militant group Hezbollah. Ayyash was convicted of five charges including conspiracy aimed at committing a terrorist act and the intentional homicide of the former prime minister. This was the first tribunal of international character to prosecute terrorist crimes.
On an international level, the verdict was well-received. Global Affairs Canada stated, “The STL’s decision sends a strong message that those who perpetrate and threaten international peace and security will be held accountable.” Canada played an important role in the STL by contributing approximately $8 million and sending RCMP investigators. Furthermore, two Canadians, Norman Farrell and Daniel Bellemare, served as chief prosecutors in the case while Heidi Matthews, an assistant professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, worked as an intern at the Immediate Office of the Prosecutor at the STL.
Despite the decision being well-received by Canada, the United States, and several other nations, many have criticized the STL for taking too long to produce a verdict. Critics have also drawn attention to the various staff resignations that occurred during the trial, and the UN’s initial sidelining of Wissam Eid, the assassinated Lebanese captain who discovered a large chunk of the evidence that led to Ayyash’s conviction.
In Lebanon, the reactions to the verdict were mixed but calm overall, as the verdict seemed to be in line with the country’s traditional formula of “no victor, no vanquished,” which ensures a façade of unity. Although a member of Hezbollah was convicted, many of its supporters celebrated the fact that three other Hezbollah members were found not guilty and that the organization itself was not charged. On the other hand, Saad Hariri, the son of the assassinated prime minister, said that he and his family accepted the verdict and that it was time for Hezbollah to “assume responsibility.”
Many commentators appreciated that the STL verdict set an important precedent of accountability for Lebanon, especially considering that there has been no accountability for the vast majority of assassinations that have plagued the country’s modern history. That being said, it is highly unlikely that Ayyash will be delivered to or apprehended by Lebanese authorities. In addition to this being impossible in a country with no rule of law, the arrest of Ayyash could possibly reignite sectarian tensions. Many argued for years that the STL verdict would reignite sectarian tensions between Lebanon’s Sunni and Shi’ite communities, but just one month later, the talk surrounding the verdict gradually disappeared from both the news and political arena. This is partly due to the fact that the tensions stemming from the STL had already reached a boiling point in the country’s brief 2008 civil conflict. More importantly, however, the circumstances surrounding Lebanon today are drastically different from those in 2005.
Since Hariri’s assassination in 2005, Lebanese society has witnessed the assassinations of multiple political and intellectual figures, the July War in 2006, a brief civil conflict in 2008, the repercussions of the Syrian civil war, an unprecedented refugee crisis, a two-year long government formation delay, and the largest nation-wide protests in the country’s history just last year. More recently, on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion in the port of Beirut ripped the city apart, killing around 200 people including two Canadians. The explosion, which was caused by a large amount of neglected ammonium nitrate in a port container, has come to epitomize governmental failure, corruption, and lack of accountability. Until now, no one has been held accountable for this tragedy, reinforcing the idea that there is no justice in Lebanon.
The STL’s verdict was announced in the aftermath of this tragedy, to a country both traumatized and largely detached from the events of 2005. In this light, although the case sets a precedent in the international community for being “the first tribunal of international character to prosecute terrorist crimes,” so much time has passed that one can’t help but feel that the result is merely symbolic and just another case of “justice delayed is justice denied.”