Amal Clooney

When the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt delivered its judgment on 30 November 2021, Reda’s mother was in the courtroom. Six years earlier, she and her five-year-old daughter had been enslaved in Fallujah by the man now facing the court. Her testimony about their captivity and her daughter’s death helped establish the first conviction of an Islamic State member for genocide.

Amal Clooney represented her alongside the German lawyers Natalie von Wistinghausen and Jörg Oesterle. Their client participated as a co-plaintiff, a status that allowed her to remain in the proceedings, receive legal assistance and make applications through counsel. Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutor brought the criminal case; the three lawyers represented the woman whose account supplied evidence of what had happened inside the defendant’s home.

German courts could hear the case under the Code of Crimes against International Law, enacted in 2002. Section 1 allows them to try genocide, crimes against humanity and specified war crimes committed abroad even when the offences have no connection to Germany. Taha A.-J. was Iraqi, his victims were a Yazidi mother and daughter from Iraq, and the conduct occurred in Fallujah. His wife, Jennifer W., was German, but jurisdiction over his crimes did not depend on her nationality.

Taha was arrested in Greece in May 2019 and transferred to Germany that October. His trial opened in Frankfurt in April 2020 and continued for nineteen months. The judges had to determine both what he had done to the mother and child and whether he had acted with the intent to contribute to the destruction of the Yazidi religious group.

Reda and her mother

Reda and her mother came from Kocho, a village in Sinjar that Islamic State fighters overran in August 2014. The attackers separated men from women and children, killed the men and took women and children into captivity. Mother and daughter were sold repeatedly before Taha bought them in Raqqa in June 2015. He had been running an Islamic State office there for a religious healing practice involving exorcism. About two weeks after buying them, he took them to Fallujah, where he lived with Jennifer W.

The Frankfurt court found that Taha controlled their movements, deprived them of adequate food, forced them to practise Islam and subjected them to repeated beatings. Reda’s mother worked in the household, and both lived in constant fear. One day, when Reda was ill and had wet a mattress, he tied her outdoors to the window bars as punishment. Temperatures in Fallujah reached as high as 51 degrees Celsius in the shade. The child suffered heatstroke and died.

Her mother was in the house and unable to intervene. The court later identified that helplessness, together with the subsequent uncertainty about what had become of her daughter, as causes of serious psychological harm.

Yazda, the Yazidi survivor organisation, located her in Iraq and interviewed her two years before the trial began. By then the organisation had gathered thousands of survivor testimonies. It helped her participate in the German proceedings, where her evidence would be tested against the defendant’s account and considered alongside evidence of the wider campaign against the Yazidis.

German law allowed her to join the case through the Nebenklage, usually translated as private accessory prosecution. Victims of qualifying offences can participate alongside the public prosecution and defence, with rights to attend hearings, question witnesses, object and ask the court to take evidence. Those rights gave her lawyers a continuing role throughout the trial, including the ability to advance arguments on her behalf.

Clooney and her co-counsel used that position to ask the court to consider gender-based persecution as a crime against humanity. Their argument addressed the treatment of Yazidi women and girls specifically: the enslavement and abuse targeted them because of their gender as well as their religion. The application sought recognition of that conduct in addition to the charges the public prosecutor had brought.

Her lawyers referred to her publicly as Reda’s mother or as their client. She gave evidence in a case that attracted worldwide attention while retaining the privacy of her own name.

Proving genocide

To convict Taha of genocide, the court had to find that he intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part, and that he committed one of the acts the law specifies with that intent. The prosecution had to establish his own purpose in abusing the mother and child, as well as the Islamic State’s wider policy toward the Yazidis.

The court considered the treatment of Reda and her mother within the Islamic State’s organised campaign of killings, forced conversion and enslavement. The group’s doctrine denied the Yazidis a right to continue practising their religion. Its members separated families, enslaved women and girls, imposed religious observance and sought to destroy the community’s continued existence. Expert evidence helped establish that broader policy; the mother’s testimony described how Taha enforced it in his own household.

The judges found that he regarded his captives as worthless and deliberately inflicted physical and psychological harm to contribute to the destruction of their religion and its members. His eventual aim of establishing an Islamic caliphate did not displace that genocidal intent. Destroying the Yazidi community could be an intermediate objective pursued in service of that further goal.

The genocide conviction rested on Section 6(1)(2), which prohibits causing serious bodily or mental harm to a member of the protected group. The Genocide Convention uses the plural “members,” as did an earlier German provision; the legislature deliberately clarified the wording by using the singular when it adopted the international-crimes code. The Federal Court of Justice examined that history on appeal. Serious harm to an individual can satisfy the provision when the other elements of genocide, including the perpetrator’s intent to destroy the group, are established.

The court therefore considered Taha’s conduct together with similar acts by other Islamic State members. The organised enslavement and forced religious observance of Yazidi women and girls were capable of contributing to the group’s destruction. Within that campaign, the harm he inflicted on Reda and her mother was sufficient to support his individual conviction.

The judgment also distinguished the intent to inflict that harm from an intent to kill. The trial findings did not establish that Taha intended Reda’s death, so the genocide conviction could not rest on the statutory provision for intentional killing. It rested on the serious bodily harm he deliberately inflicted on the child and the serious mental harm he deliberately inflicted on her mother. The fatal outcome was also reflected in his conviction for the war crime of torture resulting in death.

The defence disputed the account of Reda’s death and produced documents purporting to show that she was alive. Investigators with the United Nations team examining Islamic State crimes checked the documents in Iraq and found them to be forged.

The conviction and appeal

Taha entered court with a folder covering his face. As the verdict was read on 30 November 2021, he fainted, briefly interrupting the proceedings. The court convicted him of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, sentenced him to life imprisonment and ordered him to pay Reda’s mother €50,000.

The presiding judge, Christoph Koller, identified the decision as the first genocide conviction arising from the Islamic State’s campaign against the Yazidis. Jennifer W. had been sentenced in Munich the previous month to ten years for her part in the abuse; Reda’s mother had testified in that proceeding too. Jennifer had served in the group’s morality police, and her criminal responsibility was considered in a separate case.

Clooney described the verdict as the recognition Yazidi survivors had been waiting for since the attacks of 2014. It was the first conviction of an Islamic State member for genocide anywhere in the world, following earlier recognition of the genocide by the United Nations and other public bodies.

Taha appealed, and the Federal Court of Justice decided the case on 30 November 2022. The Third Criminal Senate upheld the factual findings, the genocide conviction and the life sentence. It changed the formal description of some concurrent offences, applying the rules that govern how several violations arising from the same conduct are recorded in a verdict.

One change concerned the separate conviction for aiding the war crime of displacement. The appellate court found that the facts did not establish the necessary contribution to the displacement offence. Another concerned bodily harm resulting in death under ordinary German criminal law: the international-crimes convictions already covered that wrongdoing, so the domestic offence did not remain as a separate count. The final verdict retained genocide, crimes against humanity involving enslavement, torture, serious harm and deprivation of liberty with a fatal result, and the war crime of torture resulting in death.

The appellate decision was made public in January 2023, leaving the genocide conviction and life sentence final. That same month, on 19 January, the Bundestag recognised the crimes against the Yazidi community as genocide. The parliamentary resolution urged further prosecutions. It followed the Frankfurt verdict by more than a year and had no effect on the court’s findings or the defendant’s liability.

Participation after Frankfurt

When Reda’s mother joined the proceedings, German law did not expressly list genocide and crimes against humanity among the offences that entitled victims to participate as co-plaintiffs. Survivors instead relied on overlapping offences under ordinary criminal law, including homicide, sexual violence and serious deprivation of liberty. A prosecution could concern international crimes while the victim’s formal right to take part depended on the domestic offences arising from the same conduct.

Germany addressed that gap in the Act for the Development of International Criminal Law, passed by the Bundestag in June 2024 and effective that August. The reform added genocide, crimes against humanity and specified war crimes directly to the co-plaintiff provisions, subject to requirements concerning the rights injured and their connection to the offence being tried. It also expanded access to appointed counsel and psychosocial support for qualifying victims.

Other changes improved interpretation and the recording of proceedings of outstanding historical significance. The legislation amended the offence of enforced disappearance and expanded provisions concerning sexual violence, including sexual slavery. It also expressly recognised persecution on grounds of sexual orientation as a crime against humanity. These were later changes to the law; they did not supply the legal basis for Taha’s conviction or alter the final judgment against him.

The reform followed Germany’s broader experience of international-crimes proceedings, including the Syrian torture trials and investigations concerning Ukraine. Those cases had exposed practical difficulties in representing large numbers of survivors, providing language access and enabling victims to participate in trials conducted far from where the crimes occurred.

Courts may appoint a common lawyer for several co-plaintiffs whose interests align, including victims whose injuries arise from the same underlying events. In specified cases where participation rests solely on the new international-crimes provisions, that lawyer exercises the procedural rights on their behalf. The court may allow a victim to make a personal closing statement, but the statute does not guarantee that opportunity in those circumstances. Survivors had made such statements in the Koblenz torture trial, addressing the court themselves at the close of the proceedings.

Eligibility also depends on the interests the statute lists, including physical integrity, liberty and religious, sexual or reproductive self-determination. That wording leaves questions about access for victims whose injuries consist of psychological torture or discriminatory persecution without an injury falling within those categories.

The substantive criminal law has continued to develop as well. In July 2025, the Federal Court of Justice removed a finding of aiding and abetting genocide from a separate Koblenz judgment. The findings established the Islamic State’s genocide but did not establish that defendant’s assistance in the genocidal acts at issue. Other international-crimes convictions remained, and the case returned for a new sentencing decision. The ruling required proof of the individual defendant’s contribution even where the wider campaign of genocide was established.

A continuing practice

Clooney is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, Professor of Practice in International Law at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, and co-founder of the Clooney Foundation for Justice and the Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice. Her work for Yazidi survivors has involved both efforts to secure investigations and representation in the national proceedings that followed.

By January 2023, Clooney, von Wistinghausen, Oesterle and Sonka Mehner, working in different combinations, had represented Yazidi victims across nine German cases. The proceedings extended over several years and included trials in Frankfurt, Munich, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Koblenz, with survivors giving evidence against the people who had held them captive.

After the final decision in Taha’s case, Clooney spoke of her client’s relief that the man who had enslaved her and killed her daughter would serve a life sentence. She credited the German prosecutors and called for other countries to pursue comparable cases. Nadia Murad, herself a survivor from Kocho, said that Taha was the first Islamic State member convicted of genocide and would not be the last.