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Mohammad Omar Aly Hassan, Ziyad Yaghi, and Hysen Sherifi are three Americans charged with conspiring to engage in various terrorist activities. The district court convicted them of various counts of conspiring to commit acts of terrorism abroad. Sherifi was also convicted of conspiring to kill members of the uniformed services within the United States.

The defendants had performed various overt acts in furtherance of a terrorist conspiracy, including travelling to the Middle East, participating in weapons trainings and creating a weapons arsenal, raising money for violent jihadist efforts, and posting about their extremist beliefs on social media.

On appeal to the Fourth Circuit, the appellants challenged their convictions on constitutional and evidentiary grounds. They first argued that the convictions were based on constitutionally protected speech (First Amendment). They also made various evidentiary challenges, including a challenge to the admissibility of lay and expert witness testimony, as well as social media videos and videos collected from defendant’s cell phone demonstrating weapon training. Finally, they challenged the sufficiency of the evidence to support their conviction.

The Court dismissed all of the appellant’s challenges and upheld the district court’s conviction on all of the charges.

Sulaiman Abu Ghaith (49), a Kuwaiti Islamist, was considered an official Al-Qaeda spokesman. He is married to one of Osama bin Laden's daughters. After the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, he praised the attacks in a series of impassioned videotaped messages and promised more attacks to follow, threatening with reprisals for the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, saying, "Americans should know, the storm of the planes will not stop... There are thousands of the Islamic nation's youths who are eager to die just as the Americans are eager to live".

Initially living in Afghanistan, he supposedly fled the country in 2002 and went to Iran, where he lived under house arrest until 2013, when he left for Turkey. Turkey intended to deport him to Kuwait, but as he passed Jordan, he was caught by the Jordanian authorities and extradited to the US. Here he was put on trial for terrorism charges (conspiracy to kill Americans, and providing material support to terrorists and conspiring to do so). He pleaded not guilty, but the jury disagreed: on 26 March 2014, he was found guilty of all charges. The sentencing judgment is expectedly due on 8 September 2014.

On 14 February 2005, a bomb in downtown Beirut exploded, killing 22 people, including the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon was established by the Security Council in order to prosecute persons responsible for the bombing.

In its interlocutory decision, the Appeals Chamber interpreted the STL Statute to require application of substantive Lebanese law as applied by Lebanese courts, but not before noting that binding international obligations, including customary international law, should inform any such interpretation. The Appeals Chamber held, inter alia, that not only does a customary rule exists between states to suppress terrorist act, but that terrorism is an individual international crime under customary law.

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon Appeals Chamber examined state practice and binding international covenants to assert that the crime of terrorism is “commonly accepted at the international level.” As such, the Chamber derived the key components in formulating a general definition of terrorism: (1) the perpetration of a criminal act; (2) the intent to spread fear among the population or coerce a national or international authority to take some action; (3) and the act involves a transnational element.  For the first time, a tribunal of international character has established the existence of a customary rule of international law recognizing an international crime of terrorism in times of peace.

The armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo opposed numerous tribes of different ethnicities in their struggle to gain power and territory, particularly over the Ituri provence in the north-eastern part of the DRC, an area rich in natural resources such as gold and diamonds. One such group, the Union Patriotique des Congolais, was established in 2000 and appointed as its chairman, the Accused, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo. He was also the commander in chief of the armed wing of the UPC, the Front Patriotique pour la Libération du Congo. This armed group was well-known for its use of young children to participate in the hostilities, from fighting, to cooking, cleaning, spying, and being used as sexual slaves.

Trial Chamber I, in the International Criminal Court’s first verdict, convicted Thomas Lubanga of the offense of conscripting, enlisting or using children to actively participate in hostilities. In defining active participation, the Chamber adopted a broad definition so as to include children involved even indirectly, so long as their contribution placed them in real danger as a potential target. Unfortunately, the Chamber did not discuss whether sexual violence against these children also fell within the scope of the offense.