France Seeks Evidence against Syrian Regime on Border

France has sent its senior human rights envoy to countries bordering Syria to collect evidence to level against the regime in the International Criminal Court, diplomats said Wednesday.

Ambassador Francois Zimeray is "in the region" to collect testimony from Syrian refugees and witnesses to the fighting in order that France can lodge a complaint with the court against Bashar al-Assad's regime, they said.

"I think Bashar al-Assad is behaving like a murderer and should be made to answer before the International Criminal Court," President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a radio interview, with direct reference to the diplomat's mission.

Paris hopes tangible and credible evidence of reportedly widespread abuses -- including torture, murder and the shelling of civilian areas in revolt against the regime -- will oblige the international community to act.

Syria is not a signatory to the treaty setting up the International Criminal Court, which was established with U.N. support to prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity where national courts fail to do so.

That being so, the only way the ICC could be charged with bringing a case against regime leaders would be by order of the U.N. Security Council.

That appears far off, as permanent council members Russia and China have prevented any condemnation of Assad's regime. Moscow is allied with Damascus and China traditionally opposes infringing national sovereignty.

French diplomats confirmed that Zimeray's mission was under way, but would not give details of his program, seeking to protect his eventual contacts in the countries bordering Syria, in the grip of a year-long revolt.

The United Nations Commission for Human Rights has said it has also sent observers to the region to collect details on the regime's crackdown.

Officials in Paris said Britain and the European Union were thinking along the same lines, and that several non-governmental human rights groups were helping official bodies gather witness testimony and evidence.

Global watchdog Amnesty International said those arrested in Assad's brutal repression of the revolt face a "nightmarish world of systematic torture ... reminiscent of the dark era of the 1970s and 1980s."

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the violence has left 8,500 dead since March 2011. The U.N. Refugee Agency has registered 30,000 as having fled Syria and estimated 200,000 have been displaced within its borders.