On Tuesday, May 19, a new hearing was held in Damascus in the trial of dignitaries from the former regime, including Bashar al-Assad, tried in absentia. In a country fractured by 14 years of civil war, marked by massacres whose scale and atrocity are still being discovered, transitional justice represents a major issue. Between high-profile arrests and publicly open trials, the new authorities are trying to present themselves well despite poorly equipped legal tools and risks of selective justice.