Is that what a genocide looks like?

This is a naive and legally meaningless question, and yet it will probably go through the minds of most who see Taha Al J. before the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court.

A thin young man in a sports jacket, his long black hair slicked back behind his neck.

Leaning on a crutch, he hobbles through the hall to the dock, attentively follows the almost three and a half hour pleading of the federal prosecutor's office, which two interpreters translate for him.

He is busy taking notes, talking animatedly during the breaks, gesticulating.

Matthias Trautsch

Coordination of the Rhine-Main report.

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The now 31-year-old Iraqi is believed to be responsible for the death of a five-year-old Yezidi, as a member of the so-called “Islamic State” (IS).

He is said to have previously bought and exploited the girl and her mother as slaves, he is said to have both abused and forced to follow Islamic religious practices, and he is said to have tied the child who had wet himself to a window grille in the courtyard of his house for "punishment" .

Enforce the principle of world law

At well over 40 degrees in the blazing sun, the girl is said to have died of heat stroke during or after the hour-long ordeal.

The process is seen as groundbreaking.

This is not due to the cruelty of the alleged act, but to the fundamental question of whether the principle of universal law can be enforced.

It's about whether crimes like genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes are punished globally.

Senior Public Prosecutor Anna Zabeck, who gave the final lecture of the indictment on Monday, referred in advance to the importance that goes beyond the specific proceedings.

It is about a "signal on a national and international level".

According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, Taha Al J. is to be sentenced to life imprisonment under the International Criminal Code.

In addition, the prosecution demands that the particular gravity of the guilt be determined.

The fact that the Iraqi is on trial in Frankfurt is because he was arrested in Athens on the basis of an international arrest warrant and extradited to Germany.

But it is indirectly related to the fact that he was married to a German Islamist who brought the investigators on his track.

Jennifer W. also testified as a witness in the Frankfurt trial, in a separate trial the Munich Higher Regional Court sentenced her to ten years in prison in October.

The court was convinced that the now thirty-year-old had done nothing about the mistreatment of the Yezidi girl.

Jennifer W. and her future husband, who was called Abu Muawia in the IS terror system, met in 2015 in a Syrian women's shelter, where Taha Al J. worked as a “spiritual healer” for the terrorist militia.

The question of the ideological orientation

Together they are said to have bought Nora B. and her daughter as slaves.

According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, the Yazidis were captured in the summer of 2014 as part of an IS raid against the religious minority.

The male Yazidis were killed if they did not convert to Islam, Nora B., who testified as the most important witness in Frankfurt on seven days of the trial, was raped by IS men and resold several times with her daughter, until they were both at Abu Muawia and Jennifer W. landed.

Nora B. had to toil around the house, was not allowed to leave the house with a few exceptions, and was beaten because of the slightest mishap.

While the landlord and his German wife drank clean water from the refrigerator, only the inedible water from the tap remained for the Yazidi mother and her daughter.

Whether the mistreatment and ultimately the death of the girl count as a crime against international law depends, among other things, on whether the acts of Abu Muawia and Jennifer W. were only directed against the specific people or whether they acted in accordance with the ideology of IS, according to which the religious group of the Yazidis should be destroyed.

For such an “intent to destroy” in the sense of international law, as Chief Public Prosecutor Zabeck said, it is not mandatory that the physical or physical existence of a people should be destroyed.

The fact can also be fulfilled if the social and cultural existence is to be extinguished.

This could be done through systematic humiliation, rape, the destruction of holy places or the compulsion to adopt a religion.

Another example of this is that Nora B. was no longer allowed to name her daughter by her real Yezidi name.