From Syria to China, dictators are still getting away with murder | Jonathan Freedland

Faced with evidence of crimes against humanity, we can't rely on the glacial pace of international law to provide justice

It's a scene that's been played out both in high drama and a blockbuster thriller, in Death and the Maiden and in Marathon Man - a victim chancing many years later upon their tormentor - but in Berlin in 2014 it happened for real. Anwar al-Bunni was in a grocery shop when he ran into a fellow Syrian emigre whose face was familiar. It took him a while to realise that the man was a former intelligence officer who, al-Bunni was sure, once interrogated and jailed him.

That encounter led to a trial in a Koblenz court of both that officer and an underling, and this week the more junior of the pair, Eyad al-Gharib, was found guilty of aiding and abetting a crime against humanity inside one of Bashar al-Assad's jails, a crime that included torture. The verdict was hailed as a first encouraging crack in the impunity of the Assad regime, which has not yet faced justice for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians it killed as it suppressed an uprising that began a decade ago.