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In 1994, an armed conflict between the Rwandese government forces and the Rwandese Patriotic Front and the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens in Rwanda and the elimination of approximately 75% of the Tutsi population.

Joseph Mpambara was a member of the interahamwe militia who fled Rwanda for Kenya and finally the Netherlands after 1994. He is charged with having murder, rape, kidnapping, hostage taking and torture against several Tutsi individuals including young children who were hacked with machetes after being forced out of an ambulance with their mother. Since the Accused is a non-Dutch national and the crimes with which he is charged did not occur on Dutch territory and did not implicate Dutch nationals in any way, the question of jurisdiction arose.

By a decision of 24 July 2007, the District Court of The Hague determined that it did not have jurisdiction to try the Accused for crimes of genocide as it lacked a statutory basis to do so. Further, it could not exercise indirect jurisdiction as one of the three criteria set out in the Dutch Penal Code was not met. 

Until July 1994, Michel Bagaragaza was the managing director of OCIR-Tea, the controlling body for the tea industry in Rwanda. Bagaragaza is accused of conspiring with his employees in order to kill Tutsis in the Gisenyi Prefecture. In addition, he was a member of the local committee of the Republican Movement for Development and Democracy (MRND) for the Gisenyi Prefecture. Bagaragaza was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on charges of genocide, and in the alternative, war crimes. His case was referred to The Netherlands at the request of the Prosecutor of the ICTR.

However, a decision of the District Court of The Hague in a case against another Rwandan national, Joseph Mpambara, in which the Court held that the Dutch courts have no jurisdiction over genocide committed by non-Dutch nationals abroad prior to 2003, was released soon after Bagaragaza's surrender to The Netherlands. Fearing that the outcome would be the same and the case against him would not proceed in The Netherlands, the ICTR requested The Netherlands to surrender Bagaragaza back to the ICTR for prosecution. By a decision of 21 March 2008, the District Court of The Hague authorised the surrender. 

Milorad Pejić was born on 4 April 1969 in the village of Vukovar located in eastern Croatia. Pejić, who lived in the United Kingdom since 1999, was arrested in March 2008 at the airport in Belgrade when he wanted to bring a visit to his mother. He was charged with being involved in a horrific massacre that took place in November 1991. At that time, ethnic Croat prisoners were taken from the Vukovar hospital and subsequently brought to a pig farm in Ovčara, outside Vukovar. The prisoners were beaten, tortured and subsequently killed. Their bodies were buried in mass graves.

In this case appearing before the Criminal Division, the accused Dušan Fuštar was found guilty for crimes against humanity regarding his participation in the running of the Keraterm camp in Prijedor municipality. He was sentenced to 9 years of imprisonment after he entered a plea agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office.

This marked the first time that a case referred to the Court of BiH by the ICTY (in the case of Željko Mejakić et al.) was settled through a plea agreement. The Court found Dušan Fuštar guilty and sentenced him to nine years of imprisonment.

In the present case, the Court refused the appeals filed by both the Prosecutor’s Office and the aggrieved party Anđa Obradović and upheld the first instance verdict of 29 June 2009. In this verdict, the accused Ferid Hodžić was acquitted of the charges for war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war in the period between May 1992 and 26 January 1993 taking place in the municipality of Vlasenica.