Colvin v. Syria
Shortly after Paul Conroy escaped from Syria, he called the Colvin family and shared his conviction that Marie and the other journalists at the Media Center in Homs had been targeted and assassinated by the Assad regime.
This information had an immediate and powerful impact on Marie’s family, whose mourning for the tragic loss of Marie’s life quickly transformed into anger at her intentional murder.
Journalists without Borders introduced the Colvin family to Scott Gilmore, an attorney at the Center for Justice and Accountability, who, together with the law firm of Shearman & Sterling, was able to prove that orders to locate and kill Marie came directly from the Office of the President Bashar al-Assad.
After several years of litigation, Marie’s family eventually prevailed against Syria - the first time a court held the regime responsible for the atrocities of war. Since then, victims of the Assad regime have files suits in Austria, France, Germany, Sweden and other European countries.
Paul Conroy and Cat Colvin, Marie’s sister.
In the spring of 2011, thousands of Syrians rose up to protest the dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad. In response, the Assad Regime launched a crackdown, which spiraled into the Middle East’s bloodiest civil war, killing hundreds of thousands of Syrians, and displacing millions. Among the victims was Marie Colvin who had snuck into the besieged city of Homs, despite the Assad Regime’s efforts to prohibit all reporting.
Broadcasting live from a clandestine media center, Marie told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that it was “a complete and utter lie that they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.” Hours later, the Syrian army zeroed in on Marie’s position, eventually hitting the media center, killing her along with French photographer Rémi Ochlik, and wounding British photographer Paul Conroy, Syrian translator Wael al-Omar, and French journalist Edith Bouvier.
Evidence submitted in Colvin v. Syria confirmed that the Assad Regime had intercepted Marie’s broadcasts, confirmed her location through an informant, and then launched the targeted, fatal, rocket attack. The Colvin family proved that Marie was deliberately assassinated by Syrian military forces and that Marie’s murder was part of a broader military strategy to eliminate Syrian and foreign media personnel.
The lawsuit was filed under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a federal law that allows victims to sue designated state-sponsors of terrorism, like the government of Syria, for the extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and was the first case seeking to hold the Assad Regime responsible for war crimes.
A wealth of evidence has been translated and submitted to the Court (including statements from high-level defectors of the Regime and never-before-seen confidential government documents smuggled out of Syria) leaving no doubt that the Regime methodically planned and perpetrated Marie’s assassination. That evidence is now publicly available for other victims of the Syrian regime to hold Assad accountable in jurisdictions throughout the world.
PBS Newshour: Family of slain journalist Marie Colvin sues Syria for her death
Shearman & Sterling produced a short documentary providing a behind-the-scenes look at the lawsuit against the Syrian regime for the assassination of American war correspondent Marie Colvin.