The Missing Perpetrator and the Missing Victim: What France’s First Conviction for the Yazidi Genocide Reveals

[Natia Navrouzov is a lawyer and the Executive Director of Yazda, a global Yazidi organisation that has documented ISIL’s crimes since 2014 and supports survivors of the Yazidi genocide through legal, psychosocial, and advocacy work]

On 20 March 2026, the Paris Assize Court convicted Sabri Essid of genocide and crimes against humanity for atrocities committed against the Yazidi community in Iraq. Essid, a French national who joined ISIL in Syria, was tried in absentia and is presumed dead. The judgment is historic: it is the first time a French court has recognised the Yazidi genocide and confirmed that ISIL’s campaign of killings, enslavement, sexual violence, and persecution amounted not only to terrorism but also to genocide and crimes against humanity.

Yet the trial also showed how incomplete justice remains. Two absences marked the proceedings. The accused was not in court. Nor was one of his victims whose name and story were central to the case but who is still missing more than a decade after her abduction. Together, these absences point to a wider problem. Prosecutions are moving forward, but they are not yet connected to the search for the missing, the identification of the dead, and other forms of truth and redress that survivors see as essential.

As the Yazidi community marks twelve years since the genocide on 3 August, the main question is no longer whether genocide occurred or whether it can be prosecuted. The question is whether the next phase of accountability can move beyond isolated prosecutions towards an integrated, survivor-centred approach that links criminal trials, evidence sharing, forensic investigations, and the search for those who are still unaccounted for.

A Patchwork of Accountability

After ISIL’s territorial defeat, many expected a strong international response to its crimes. Instead, justice has developed slowly and unevenly through national courts.

In Iraq, ISIL members are mainly prosecuted under counterterrorism laws. Iraqi criminal law does not currently codify genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes as distinct offences. Some judges have tried to work around this gap by using the Yazidi Survivors Law, a national reparations law that recognises the genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the Yazidis, as a basis to address core international crimes in their reasoning. So far, however, this has happened only in a small number of cases and cannot serve as a long-term solution. Most trials still focus on ISIL membership rather than on what was done to specific communities. Recent developments suggest this approach will continue. Transfers since January of more than 5,700 detainees from north-east Syria to Iraq illustrate how this dynamic persists. Iraqi authorities have already completed investigation and accountability procedures for nearly 4,900 of these detainees and expect many cases to be referred to the courts beginning in August, again primarily under counterterrorism laws rather than for international crimes.

As a result, Europe has become the main place where ISIL crimes against the Yazidis are prosecuted as international crimes. According to Yazda’s monitoring, about fifteen such cases have been brought so far, mostly in Germany, with others in the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, and Kosovo and now France. These cases show that domestic courts can apply international criminal law and that survivor testimony can shape the legal record. In the absence of an international or hybrid tribunal, they have become the main way in which the Yazidi genocide has been judicially recognised.

However, this system is patchy. Who faces trial often depends on where a suspect happens to be arrested, whether a state has jurisdiction, and whether prosecutors have the time, resources, and political backing to act. For Yazidi survivors, this means that justice appears in some places and not in others, without a clear overall plan.

The Essid judgment fits this pattern. It proves that French courts can recognise and prosecute genocide, even when the accused is not in custody. At the same time, it highlights the limits of a model that still reaches only a small number of suspects and leaves most of those responsible beyond the scope of any proceedings. Fragmented accountability has meant no common strategy for who should be prosecuted, where, and on the basis of which evidence.

Two Practical Barriers: Perpetrators and Evidence

This lack of a common strategy is not just an abstract problem; it has concrete effects on what justice can deliver. Even when states want to act, they face two practical obstacles.

The first is access to perpetrators. European trials have largely involved people already present on national territory, notably women repatriated from camps in Syria. Accountability for male ISIL members has been far more rare, a gap that reflects political decisions about repatriation rather than the absence of evidence. 

Of the sixteen people prosecuted so far for genocide or crimes against humanity against the Yazidis, eleven have been women, most of them repatriated and tried upon return. By contrast, thousands of suspected ISIL members, including many European men, remain detained in north-east Syria or have been transferred to Iraq without facing charges for international crimes. 

According to Yazda’s monitoring, Murat Dernjani remains the only European male ISIL member physically brought before a domestic court to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed against the Yazidis. Other European men, including Sammy Djedou in Belgium, have been tried in their absence. In practice, accountability depends less on what a suspect is alleged to have done than on where he is held and whether any state is willing and able to bring a case at all.

The Essid case makes this paradox visible. France was among the European countries with the highest number of citizens who joined ISIL, yet its first conviction for the Yazidi genocide concerned a defendant presumed dead and tried in his absence. A conviction in the absence of the accused can acknowledge survivors, build the record, and confirm the legal character of atrocities. For survivors, the trial still mattered. The courtroom became a platform to speak, to have their experiences heard, and to see a French court recognise the genocide. The judgment also set an important precedent and showed that French judges are willing to apply international criminal law to ISIL’s crimes.

At the same time, it highlighted the limits of what domestic courts can do on their own. Whether they can prosecute individuals often depends on political decisions about repatriation and jurisdiction, rather than on judicial willingness. The recent transfers of detainees to Iraq have included European nationals, but many of them remain beyond the reach of courts that could prosecute them for international crimes in line with existing standards. A trial in the absence of the accused cannot replace a broader accountability strategy able to reach the wider network of perpetrators

The second obstacle is access to evidence. In 2017, the UN Security Council established the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD). Until its closure in September 2024, UNITAD collected an enormous amount of material on ISIL’s crimes, including documents, digital files, witness statements, and forensic evidence from mass graves. This archive, together with the work of Yazidi and other civil society organisations, helped make cases like Essid possible and has changed what is possible in domestic prosecutions of ISIL’s international crimes.

When UNITAD’s mandate ended, its archive was split. The full archive is now held within the UN system in New York. A partial copy was transferred to Iraq’s National Center for International Judicial Cooperation (NCIJC), created under the Supreme Judicial Council to take over some of UNITAD’s functions and support domestic prosecutions. However, this partial copy does not include all witness statements, because informed consent for their transfer to Iraq had not been obtained. As a result, the full archive remains in New York, and neither prosecutors in Iraq nor in other countries have a clear way to request and use them.

The problem is therefore not that evidence does not exist. The problem is that there is no clear, shared system for using it across jurisdictions. Without such a system, the record built over years of documentation risks being underused just as more prosecutions become possible.

These two access problems, limited access to perpetrators and to evidence, help explain why accountability has remained selective and slow, despite growing recognition of the Yazidi genocide. But even if these obstacles were solved, criminal trials alone would still not meet all the needs that survivors have expressed.

What Survivors Want Most: Finding the Missing

The limits of the current approach become clearest when viewed from the perspective of Yazidi families. Having followed and attended many of these proceedings, I came to see the gap between what courts can offer and what survivors most urgently seek. As lawyers, many of us are trained to understand justice primarily through investigations, prosecutions, and convictions. Yet after each judgment, one reality did not change: the missing were still missing, and the questions families asked most often – Where are they? Will they ever be found? – remained unanswered.

In the Essid case, one missing woman was at the centre of the proceedings. Survivors, lawyers, the prosecutor and judges spoke about her repeatedly. Her story helped to prove genocide. Yet she is still missing. For her family, the conviction did not answer the questions that shape their daily lives: what happened to her after her abduction, and where is she now?

For many Yazidi survivors, justice starts with basic needs. They want to know where their relatives are, to find and identify bodies, and to give them a dignified burial. A Yazda survey of 601 Yazidi survivors in 2025 reflects this. Seventy-one per cent said their highest priority was finding missing relatives. Exhumation of mass graves was next at 64 per cent. Only 39 per cent named access to justice as their top concern. This does not mean that trials are unimportant. It means that, in survivors’ eyes, trials are only one part of justice.

Twelve years after the genocide, around 2,500 Yazidis are still missing. 

Over a hundred mass graves have been found and documented. 

Since 2019 and based on statistics Yazda obtained from the relevant Iraqi teams, the Mass Graves and Missing Persons Directorate under the Martyrs Foundation and the Medico-Legal Department under the Ministry of Health, eighty-four graves have been exhumed and around 784 sets of remains recovered. 

Yet only 297 have been identified and returned to families. Hundreds of bodies are still awaiting DNA analysis and identification in Iraqi forensic facilities. At the same time, possible graves in parts of northern Syria remain hard to reach.

The problem is not only that many people are still missing. It is also that many of the dead have not yet been named. This leaves families in limbo and shows how much of the work that matters most to them still lies outside the courtroom.

The same tension appears beyond Essid. Germany’s conviction of Taha Al.-Jumailly was the first case worldwide in which an ISIL member was convicted of genocide against the Yazidis. The judgment recognised the suffering of a Yazidi mother, Nura, whose testimony was central to the case. Yet her five-year-old daughter Reda’s remains were never returned, and no effective mechanism exists to establish their whereabouts. 

Together, the Essid and Taha A.-J. cases show both the power and the limits of criminal accountability. They have changed how the Yazidi genocide is recognised in law, but they have not resolved the uncertainty that still defines the lives of thousands of families. They also make clear what criminal courts can and cannot do. 

Courts cannot themselves conduct exhumations, identify remains, or run long-term searches for the missing. The problem lies less with the courts than with the way accountability has evolved. Criminal proceedings, forensic investigations, documentation efforts, and mechanisms for the missing have largely developed in parallel rather than as parts of a common strategy. 

As a result, much of the work needed to establish the fate of the missing has fallen to Iraqi institutions, forensic teams, and civil society organisations. In practice, it has often been Yazidi groups and other civil society organisations that have stepped in to fill these gaps. They have documented crimes, helped locate and document mass grave sites, supported prosecutions, and accompanied families searching for relatives. Much of the evidence used in court today exists because of their efforts. Their expertise and relationships are as important for truth-seeking, reparations, and the search for the missing as they are for criminal prosecutions. Yet they remain underfunded and only loosely integrated into formal accountability processes.

If accountability is to reflect survivors’ priorities, the search for the missing cannot remain a separate humanitarian task. It must be treated as a core part of justice. Locating the disappeared, identifying recovered remains, bringing together information held by different actors, and supporting families and local organizations throughout that process are not activities that follow justice; they are among the ways justice is realised.

From Recognition to Resolution 

The Essid judgment shows both how far justice for Yazidis has come and how far it still has to go. A French court recognised the Yazidi genocide and convicted a perpetrator in a carefully conducted trial, yet it could not bring him into the courtroom or answer what happened to a missing victim whose story anchored the case. Those gaps reflect the wider constraints of the current accountability system, rather than any lack of effort by the court itself.

Facing those constraints means looking beyond individual trials and focusing on how the system as a whole can work better. The next phase of accountability will depend on making better use of what already exists, identifying the gaps that remain, and aligning efforts around clear priorities, some of which are proposed here.

First, existing evidence must be used effectively. The archive created by UNITAD, together with material held by Iraqi institutions should become accessible for prosecutions and other justice processes. States, the UN, and Iraq should agree on practical rules for sharing evidence, protecting witnesses, and respecting Iraqi ownership. Civil society organisations, which have also collected a large part of relevant material, should be supported and given the means to manage and share their documentation in line with informed consent, confidentiality, and security standards. Taken together, these steps would allow the same body of evidence to support both criminal cases and the search for the missing.

Second, prosecutions must be coordinated where suspects are held. Accountability should not depend on where a suspect happens to be arrested. A more coherent approach would support Iraq to adopt and apply laws on genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, strengthen the National Center for International Judicial Cooperation as a hub for evidence and cooperation, and improve links between Iraqi and European prosecutors through mutual legal assistance and, where possible, joint investigations. It should also formally include civil society organisations that have documented ISIL crimes, built cases, and developed specialised expertise, so that their knowledge and evidence can feed directly into shared strategies. Any future accountability processes in Syria, especially against ISIL members, should be connected to this broader effort from the start, rather than developing in isolation.

Third, the missing must be placed at the centre of justice and treated as a core part of accountability, not as a separate issue. This means investing in forensic work and DNA analysis, coordinating exhumations with criminal investigations, and ensuring that information from trials and from missing-persons work flows in both directions. It also means using and supporting existing mechanisms, such as the UN Independent Institution on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic (IIMP) and the new Syrian national commission on the missing and disappeared, and linking them to efforts in Iraq. Finally, it requires long-term support to civil society organisations that stand with families, document cases, and help them navigate these processes.

As the Yazidi community marks twelve years since the genocide, the success of accountability should not be measured only by the number of convictions. Courts in Europe and elsewhere have taken an important step by recognising the Yazidi genocide. The real test now is whether the response to ISIL’s crimes can move beyond fragmented cases towards a survivor-centred system that provides answers about the fate of the missing, returns the dead to their families, and upholds their right to truth and dignity. The Essid judgment is part of that step, but it also shows that convictions alone cannot answer the question that continues to matter most to thousands of Yazidi families:

Where are the missing?