Who can hold al-Sharaa to account? Syria’s Constitutional Court and the president who appointed it

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Article 47 of the Constitutional Declaration of 13 March 2025 dissolved the existing court and provides: “The Supreme Constitutional Court consists of seven members named by the President of the Republic from among persons of integrity, competence and experience. The mechanism of its work and its competences are regulated by law.” ¹

• The president names all seven members; the text gives no role to the People’s Assembly, the Supreme Judicial Council or any professional body. ¹
• The declaration sets no term of office for the judges and no rule on how they may be removed. ^{1 2}
• The president of the court is one of the two people the head of state must consult before declaring a state of emergency (Article 41). ¹
• The declaration states that the judiciary is independent and that judges are subject only to the law (Article 43). ¹

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On 5 July 2026, sixteen months after the old court was dissolved, al-Sharaa signed Decree 149 of 2026, published on 7 July. It appoints Issam Khaled al-Khalif as president of the court and six members: judges Khairallah Nadim Ghannoum, Mohammed Mustafa Sbei’ and Iman Antoine Nouri, the academics Ismail Hamadi al-Khalfan and Ri’an Hassan Kuhailan, and the lawyer Aref Ahmad al-Shaal. ^{3 4}

Under Article 3 of the decree, the judges swear their oath “before the President of the Republic”: “I swear by Almighty God to respect the Constitutional Declaration and to perform my duty with honesty and sincerity.” They did so on 11 July 2026 at the People’s Palace in Damascus, before al-Sharaa. ^{3 5}

Until a law on the court is issued, Article 4 of the decree gives it four tasks:

• reviewing the constitutionality of laws and regulations;
• giving opinions on the constitutionality of draft laws — at the request of the President of the Republic only;
• giving opinions on legislative proposals — at the request of the President of the Republic or the speaker of the People’s Assembly;
• interpreting the Constitutional Declaration — at the request of the President of the Republic or the speaker of the People’s Assembly. ³

The decree does not say who may bring a challenge to a law, and gives no route for citizens, ordinary courts or a group of members of parliament to bring a case. It sets no term of office. As of its publication, the law that is meant to regulate the court had not been issued; at its first meeting on 19 July the court discussed a draft. ^{3 6 2}

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• Issam al-Khalif, the court’s president: his published career includes administrative, legislative and oversight posts in the Salvation Government — the administration that governed Idlib under Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which al-Sharaa led — and then in the new administration. The policy outlet Souria al-Ghad found no published judicial service or documented experience in constitutional adjudication. ⁶
• Ismail al-Khalfan and Ri’an Kuhailan were two of the seven members of the committee that drafted the Constitutional Declaration in March 2025 — the text the court is now to interpret. ^{7 6}
• Khairallah Ghannoum has a judicial career in courts set up in opposition-held areas; Iman Nouri has served in the Court of Cassation in Damascus; no published professional biography was found for Mohammed Sbei’. ⁶
• Aref al-Shaal is a lawyer whose public record includes political opposition to the Assad government. ⁶

The presidency published the names and titles without explaining why each member was chosen. ⁶ We have no evidence of how any individual judge has ruled or will rule; what follows concerns the structure of the court, not the integrity of its members.

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The Constitutional Declaration contains no article on the president’s legal responsibility. It gives the People’s Assembly no power to charge, try or remove him, and gives the Constitutional Court no jurisdiction to try him. The only provision on the end of a presidency is Article 34: “in the event of a vacancy in the presidency, the First Vice President assumes the powers of the President of the Republic” — and the vice presidents are appointed and dismissed by the president. ¹

In practice this means:

• if a presidential act is thought to breach the declaration, the court can be asked to interpret the declaration only by the president himself or by the speaker of the Assembly; ³
• a third of the Assembly is appointed by the president, and a law he objects to needs a two-thirds majority to pass (Articles 24 and 39); ¹
• the judges who would rule were all chosen by the president, swore their oath before him, and have no fixed term or protection from removal in any published text; ^{1 3}
• the law that will define the court’s powers must pass an Assembly a third of whose members he appointed, and he may object to it. ¹

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Under the 2012 constitution, the president also named the members of the constitutional court (Article 141). But the text gave them a four-year term (Article 143) and stated that they could not be removed except in accordance with the law (Article 144). They swore their oath before the president “and in the presence of the speaker of the People’s Assembly”, promising to perform their duty “with impartiality and honesty” (Article 145). One fifth of the Assembly could challenge a law or a legislative decree before the court, and a party to a case could raise the unconstitutionality of a law before the courts (Article 147). Article 117 allowed the Assembly, by a two-thirds vote, to indict the president for high treason, and he was to be tried “before the Supreme Constitutional Court”. ⁸

These guarantees existed on paper only. In 2022 Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) concluded that presidential appointment had given Assad’s court merely “formal independence” and made it “a tool in the hands of the President of the Republic”. ⁹ The 2025 declaration and Decree 149 keep presidential appointment and leave out the term of office, the protection from removal, the parliamentary challenge and the treason procedure. ^{1 3}