US court orders Syria to pay $302m for journalist death

By Umar Farooq

WASHINGTON (AA) - A U.S. court ordered the government of Syria's Bashar al-Assad to pay $302 million dollars in reparations for the killing of an American correspondent.

Marie Colvin was killed after the makeshift media center she was working in the Syrian city of Homs was blasted with artillery fire.

The ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed by members of Colvin's family in 2016 that remained ignored by the Assad regime.

Foreign governments are usually immune from jurisdiction in U.S. courts through the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. However, victims are able to pursue lawsuits against governments classified as a "state sponsor of terrorism".

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia gave the ruling late Wednesday, saying that Assad regime took part in an "extrajudicial killing".

The judgement stated that the regime had tracked the broadcasts of Colvin and other journalists who had been covering the siege of Homs, and then mounted an attack on the media center, killing Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik.

The judge also ordered that a compensation of $2.5 million be paid to Cathleen Colvin, Marie's sister, as well as $11,836 in funeral expenses.

"[Colvin] was specifically targeted because of her profession, for the purpose of silencing those reporting on the growing opposition movement in the country," the court order said.

Colvin was a war journalist that spent her career across many areas, including Iraq, Chechnya, the Balkans, East Timor, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, and Libya.

She received the British Press Awards’ Foreign Reporter of the Year honor three times, and the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Courage in Journalism Award.

"By perpetrating a directed attack against the Media Center, Syria intended to intimidate journalists, inhibit newsgathering and the dissemination of information, and suppress dissent," Jackson said in her ruling.

"A targeted murder of an American citizen, whose courageous work was not only important, but vital to our understanding of warzones and of wars generally, is outrageous, and therefore a punitive damages award that multiples the impact on the responsible state is warranted."