Civil society organizations, including the Center for Justice and Accountability, while welcoming Sweden’s interest in increasing criminal accountability for atrocities committed in Syria and Iraq, advise against designing any accountability mechanism whose purpose is to deal only with crimes perpetrated by one faction in a conflict. The organizations explain: “if a mechanism were designed to overlook atrocities committed by [actors other than ISIS] in the conflict, its credibility and legitimacy would suffer greatly as would chances for reconciliation and efforts to engender the concept of a neutral judiciary.”
