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Al Bihani, Yemeni citizen and Saudi Arabian national, travelled to Afghanistan in May 2001 on jihad (holy war). He became a member of the 55^th Arab Brigade and, by his own admission, acted as a cook. The Brigade carried out a number of operations in support of the Taliban against the United States and its allies in the Northern Alliance. Al Bihani was transferred to the custody of the United States Armed Forces and thereafter to Guantanamo Bay following the surrender of his unit. Alleging the illegality of his detention at Guantanamo, al Bihani petitioned the District Court for the District of Columbia for a writ of habeas corpus. His petition was denied on the grounds that he was an “enemy combatant” within the meaning of the definition of such decided by the Court in its earlier case of Boumedienne v. Bush. On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia dismissed Al Bihani’s appeal.

Al Bihani appealed the decision arguing that he was entitled to a rehearing. A seven-member panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied the rehearing and upheld the decision that international law does not limit the President’s powers of detention and consequently al Bihani’s detention is lawful. However, all seven Circuit judges appended opinions demonstrating the importance of the question at hand and their separate reasoning.

Hissène Habré, currently a resident of Senegal, was the President of the Republic of Chad from 1982 until 1990. During that time, he established a brutal dictatorship which, through its political police, the Bureau of Documentation and Security (Direction de la Documentation et de la Sécurité (DDS)), caused the deaths of tens of thousands of individuals. He was indicted by the investigating judge in Senegal for complicity in crimes of torture committed in Chad.

The present decision of the Supreme Court upheld a decision of the Court of Appeal of Dakar barring criminal proceedings against Habré on the grounds that the Senegalese courts lacked jurisdiction to prosecute foreign nationals for acts of torture committed outside Senegal. The Supreme Court found that there was no provision in domestic legislation establishing jurisdiction over such offences.

During Indonesia’s illegal occupation of East Timor from 1975 until Timorese independence in 2005, members of the Indonesian Armed Forces along with a number of militia groups perpetrated attacks designed to terrorise the civilian population of East Timor who supported Timorese independence.

In the context of these attacks, the Accused, Mateus Lao, was a member of the Sakunar militia group. In 1999, he and other members of the militia encountered a family of two adults (including a pregnant mother) and four children attempting to cross from East Timor into West Timor. The father was singled out by the militia, taken away from his family and hacked with a machete by Lao. He died as a result of his injuries. The Court sentenced him to 8 years’ imprisonment for murder as a crime against humanity.

Colonel Nicholas Carranza served nearly thirty years as an officer in the armed forces of El Salvador. Later, he was El Salvador’s Vice-Minister of Defence and Public Security from October 1979 until January 1981. In this period, the Salvadoran Security Forces carried out systematic repression and human rights abuses against opponents of the military dictatorship that ruled the country at the time.

On 10 December 2003, the Center for Justice and Accountability and the Tennessee law firm of Bass, Berry & Sims filed a complaint against Carranza on behalf of five plaintiffs.

On 18 November 2005, a jury found Carranza guilty for the abduction, torture, insult, imprisonment and killing of the plaintiffs. He was ordered to pay $6 million in damages.

On 19 March 2009, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the jury’s verdict.

Sinan Morina is an ethnic Kosovo Albanian and was a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) during the non-international armed conflict between the KLA, on one side, and the police and military units of the SFR Yugoslavia, on the other. He was charged with participating, together with 34 members of KLA, in the killing of nine Serbian men, expulsion, imprisonment, torture and rape of Serbian civilians, and large-scale destruction of civilian property and religious objects (Orthodox churches St. Spas and St. Nikola) in the village of Opteruša between 17 and 21 July 1998. The purpose of this armed attack was to ethnically cleanse the area from all non-Albanian population and create an ethnically pure Albanian territory.

Morina was acquitted by the Belgrade District Court on 20 December 2007 due to lack of credible evidence. The Supreme Court of Serbia reversed the verdict of the War Crimes Court in 2009 and ordered a re-trial. He was arrested in Croatia on 24 February 2010 following an international arrest warrant issued by the Serbian authorities.