Search results

Ahmad al-Y. was convicted of two crimes: the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity and participation in a terrorist organisation. The court holds that the accused fought alongside Ahrar al-Sham in the Syrian Civil War and considers this organisation to have terrorist intent. Therefore, the accused is convicted for participation in a terrorist organisation.

The court finds the accused also guilty of the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity. Al-Y. can be seen in a video alongside other fighters celebrating a battlefield victory around a deceased person and putting his foot on the body of the deceased person. This conduct, in combination with other acts of the accused in the video, is humiliating and degrading enough to meet the threshold of this crime. In another video, in which the accused is roughly interrogating a captured soldier, this threshold is not met.

Ahmad al-Y. is sentenced to a combined six years of imprisonment, which is a relatively low sentence due to mitigating circumstances.

Ahmad al-Y. was accused of two crimes: the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity and participation in a terrorist organisation. The court finds that the accused fought in Syria alongside the terrorist organisation Ahrar al-Sham and he is therefore convicted of participation in a terrorist organisation.

Unlike the Court of First Instance, the Court of Appeal does not find the suspect guilty of the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity. The videos show the accused spitting towards the deceased person and putting his foot near a body, while he was celebrating a victory over soldiers of the Syrian Government. Although the actions of him and his fellow fighters are disrespectful and distasteful, the court finds that this conduct does not meet the threshold necessary for this crime. The conduct is not degrading or humiliating enough. The victims are not severely suffering and are not displayed as a trophy.

The accused is sentenced to five years and four months of imprisonment, which is lower than usual, since the case took unreasonably long.

The pronouncement of this judgment constituted one of the fastest completions of a trial of this level in the history of the Tribunal. Nizeyimana, the Accused, known as the ‘Butcher of Butare’, went on trial in January 2011. In 54 trial days, the parties presented evidence from 84 witnesses. During the proceedings almost 130 decisions were issued. The judgment was rendered just over six months from the parties’ closing submissions.

The Accused is a former captain at the Butare military academy called the École des Sous-Officiers (ESO). The Prosecution charged him with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for violence perpetrated in Butare prefecture, and, for the most part, in Butare town for mobilising ESO soldiers and others to rape and kill Tutsis, as well as other civilians.

Nizeyimana was found guilty of genocide, extermination and murder as crimes against humanity and murder as war crime. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In September 2003, members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment of the British Armed Forces detained a number of Iraqi individuals in the course of a series of hotel raids in Basra. The detainees were forced to adopt stress positions for prolonged periods of time, they were hooded and handcuffed, they were denied sleep and a particularly egregious method was adopted to ensure that they stayed awake, known as the “choir.” The detainees would be kicked and punched if they fell asleep, in response to which they would cry out in pain, resembling the voice of a choir.

Following an investigation, 7 members of the armed forces were brought before a Court Martial in Wiltshire, including Corporal Donald Payne. Payne was cleared of manslaughter and perverting the course of justice charges but he pleaded guilty to inhuman treatment in violation of the laws of war. He was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment and he was dismissed from service. The case was very well publicised, and Payne became the first member of the British armed forces to be convicted of a war crime under the provisions of the 2001 International Criminal Court Act. The questions that the Court Martial left unanswered later formed the subject of the Baha Mousa Inquiry, named after the detainee who died as a result of his interrogation.

On 15 September 2011 a badly wounded insurgent was killed in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, by Alexander Blackman, then an Acting Colour Sergeant of the Royal Marines. In video evidence, Blackman appeared to be acting calmly and deliberately in removing the insurgent from possible observation, shooting the insurgent and giving instructions to his subordinates, including indicating “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I’ve just broke the Geneva Convention”. On the basis of apparent premeditation, Blackman was convicted of murder by the court martial. In this appeal, however, the court considered fresh evidence (notably psychiatric evaluations carried out following the original conviction) suggesting that Blackman was incapable of making rational judgements or exercising self-control as a result of adjustment disorder and several “exceptional stressors”, including exhaustion, isolation, and perceived lack of leadership and support by his superiors. In light of the adjustment disorder and stressors, the court found the original conviction “unsafe” and substituted a finding of manslaughter in place of murder.