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The case involved a 21-year-old man of German nationality with Iranian roots. He became a radicalised individual of Salafist Islam while living in Germany and eventually decided to travel to Syria. During his time, there were three photographs taken of him posing with the severed heads of enemy combatants impaled on metal rods, together with another man, known to be involved with jihadists groups in Syria.

After his return to Germany, these photos were uploaded by Vedat V. onto a Facebook page, with limited privacy settings.  Additionally the accused had stored these photos on a computer belonging to the sister of a deceased foreign fighter and on his mother’s phone. The accused was arrested and charged with war crimes under the German International Criminal Code, for gravely humiliating and degrading treatment of protected persons, in this instance the bodies of deceased soldiers.

The trophy like treatment of the severed heads and knowledge of the fact that viewing such photos would horrify and shock a reasonable person demonstrated the intent of the accused to mock the dead.

He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for war crimes consisting of the degrading and humiliating treatment of protected persons.

The case of The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, adjudicated by the International Criminal Court (ICC), represents a landmark legal proceeding focused on the protection of cultural heritage during armed conflict. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, an Islamist militant, was charged with the war crime of deliberately attacking historic and religious monuments in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012. These sites, revered for their historical and cultural significance, were targeted during a period of armed conflict in the region. 

Al Mahdi's case is notable for several reasons. Firstly, it was one of the first instances where an individual was prosecuted at the ICC solely for the destruction of cultural heritage. This underscored the increasing international recognition of the importance of preserving cultural history amidst armed conflicts. Secondly, Al Mahdi's admission of guilt – a rare occurrence in international criminal law – expedited the legal proceedings and highlighted the potential for reconciliation and acknowledgment of wrongdoing in such contexts. 

Ultimately, Al Mahdi was convicted under Articles 8(2)(e)(iv) and 25(3)(a) of the Rome Statute and was sentenced to nine years in prison. His conviction served as a significant precedent, reinforcing the message that the intentional destruction of cultural heritage is a serious crime under international law and will not be tolerated.

Al Bahlul is a Yemeni national that has been imprisoned at the United States Detention Camp at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, since 2002. After over a decade of legal proceedings related to his role as a media and propaganda secretary in al Qaeda and his involvement in the 2000 Bombing of U.S.S. Cole and the 9/11 Attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, USA, the D.C. Circuit Court rejected his appeal for resentencing and upheld his life sentence.

While Al Bahlul’s legal team argued that the lower courts and the Military Commission failed to adequately reconsider his sentencing after his initial 2008 convictions were appealed and evidence of potential torture was introduced, the D.C. Circuit disagreed. It held that the CMCR adequately considered the appropriate sentence for the conspiracy conviction and that evidence on the grounds of torture was inadmissible because regulations on admissible evidence were stricter at the time of Bahlul’s original sentencing and he should have made that claim in the previous decade of appeals.

From 1975 until 2002, Indonesia illegally occupied East Timor. Pro-autonomy militia groups, as well as the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) perpetrated a number of abuses against the Timorese civilian population, targeting particularly those individuals who were suspected of being pro-independence supporters.

In August 1999, Augusto Asameta Tavares was a member of the pro-autonomy Halilintar militia group who was ordered to burn down the houses in a village and murder the inhabitants. In particular, he was ordered, along with others, to locate and stab a known pro-independence supporter, Paulino Lopes Amarel. The order was carried out and the victim died. Tavares was convicted for the domestic crime of murder by the Special Panels for Serious Crimes and sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment. The Panels did not accept the defence of duress, which required that the conduct was the result of a threat of imminent death or serious bodily harm. Although Tavares was forced to join the militia and was bound to follow orders, the Panels concluded that he could have left. Indeed, that he went along with the militia to the village and came armed with a knife demonstrated to the Panel that he shared the aim of furthering the militia’s criminal activity and contributed to the realisation of those aims.