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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.

At the end of the Second World War, Tomoyuki Yamashita was a Commander in the Japanese Army serving in the Philippines. His troops were allegedly responsible for killing, torturing and raping thousands of civilians.

On 3 September 1945, Yamashita surrendered to the United States army. A US military commission tried him for violations of the laws of war. Yamashita was charged with having failed to perform his duties as an army commander to control the operations of his troops, thus “permitting them to commit” atrocities. He was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.

Yamashita appealed at the US Supreme Court, because the military commission had lacked many procedural and evidential protections. The Supreme Court denied this appeal. The Supreme Court ruled that even if Yamashita did not know about the crimes committed by his subordinates, because of his position as a superior, he should have known. Yamashita was executed on 23 February 1946.

The outcome of this case has been much debated and criticised, because of the claimed lack of evidence and the ‘should have known’ criteria as described by the Supreme Court. 

William Laws Calley Jr. was born on 8 June 1943 in Miami, Florida. Calley was a former army officer in the United States and found guilty of killing hundreds of unarmed, innocent South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre on 16 March 1968 which took place during the Vietnam War. After several reductions, Calley’s original sentence of life in prison was turned into an order of house arrest, but after three years, President Nixon reduced his sentence with a presidential pardon.