Bassam Al-Ahmad is a Syrian human rights defender and the Co-founder and Executive Director of Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ), an organization established in 2016 and dedicated to the documentation of human rights violations throughout Syria. The STJ, based in France, has documented human rights violations throughout Syria, including those perpetrated by the previous regime and currently, regardless of the identify of perpetrators or victims.

Al-Ahmad has trained Syrian individuals and groups on evidence collections and documentation best practices after receiving a series of specialized trainings by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, the Al-Haq organization, Amnesty International, and several other groups, including UN agencies.

Al-Ahmad began his career in human rights documentation in 2005 from his hometown of Qamishli, northeast Syria, with a focus on the issue of Kurdish minority rights and statelessness. He graduated from Damascus University, where he studied Arabic literature. Al-Ahmad was involved in public opposition to the Assad regime, along with Syrian students and individuals from diverse backgrounds.

From 2012 to 2016, Al-Ahmad worked at the Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC), a project of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM). VDC was among the first centers to document human rights violations in Syria after popular uprisings began in 2011, and Al-Ahmad served as the VDC spokesperson and Director of Research and Reports. He was arrested by the previous regime due to his activities with VDC.

Al-Ahmad then began a US-funded fellowship with Syracuse University’s Maxwell School through the Leaders for Democracy program, which helped him develop the concept of STJ. He was later selected as a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), publishing a paper on Syria’s transition prior to the fall of the Assad regime. He also worked with NED in Washington on a project to combat exclusion. Al-Ahmad’s most recent article focuses on transitional justice in Syria.