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Several villagers from Aceh, Indonesia, filed a civil suit against oil and gas company Exxon Mobil. They argued that the company carried responsibility for human rights violations committed by Indonesian security forces by hiring these forces and because Exxon Mobil knew or should have known that human rights violations were being committed.

In this phase of the proceedings, the defendants requested the Court to dismiss the case, most importantly because they argued that the plaintiffs, being non-residents, could not sue in a US Court. The Court agreed with the defendants, stating that no exception should be made in this case to the general rule that non-residents cannot sue in a US court.    

Ali Mahmud Ali Shafi is a Palestinian national who was spying for Israel until he moved to Israel in 1994. On his return to Palestine in 2001, he was arrested by Palestinian Authority (PA) security officers and subsequently brought to a PA security building where he was detained for several months. During that period, he was severely beaten, left without any clothes, and was not permitted to take a bath. In 2002, Ali Shafi was forced to sign a confession which was used as the basis for his conviction of killing the Palestinian leader Raed al Karmi and for spying for Israel. He was sentenced to death. However, in March 2002, Ali Shafi escaped.

In 2009, Ali Shafi brought a claim in the District Court for the District of Columbia against the PA and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The District Court dismissed the complaint. On 14 June 2011, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit confirmed the decision because claims can only be brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) against state actors. The defendants in this case were no state actors and therefore appellants failed to state a claim within the jurisdiction conferred by the ATS.

Between 2004 and 2008, Italian courts had issued a number of judgments in which plaintiffs, victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the German Reich during WWII, were awarded damages against Germany.

Ultimately, in 2008, Germany filed an application instituting proceedings against Italy before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), arguing that "[i]n recent years, Italian judicial bodies have repeatedly disregarded the jurisdictional immunity of Germany as a sovereign State", thus violating international law. Italy disagreed, stating that the underlying acts were violations of jus cogens and therefore gave it the right to strip Germany from its immunity. Greece joined the proceedings as one of the Italian judgments concerned a declaration of enforcability by an Italian court of a Greek judgment that ordered Germany to pay compensation to victims of the Distomo massacre (in Greece). This declaration led to measures of constraint on German property in Italy.

The Court rejected Italy's claims and fully agreed with Germany's points. State immunity is part of customary international law, and the fact that the underlying acts (the WWII crimes) were violations of jus cogens did not deprive Germany from its jurisdictional immunity.

Importantly, though, the Court notes that while the current judgment confirms jurisdictional immunity of states, this does not in any way alter the possibility to hold individuals criminally responsible for certain acts.

The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited was involved in extracting and refining oil in the Ogoni region of Nigeria. Concerned over the devastating environmental impact that Shell’s activities were having on the region, a group of individuals known collectively as the Ogoni Nine, protested against Shell’s activities. The Ogoni Nine were detained by the Nigerian military junta on spurious charges, held without charge, tortured and hanged following a sham trial before a Special Tribunal in November 1995.

The present dispute is a class action filed by 12 Nigerian individuals, now US residents, seeking compensation from Shell for having aided and abetted the Nigerian government to summarily execute the activists in an effort to suppress protests against Shell’s oil operations. Specifically, they allege that Shell bribed and tampered with witnesses and paid Nigerian security forces that attacked Ogoni villages. In 2006, the District Court for the Southern District of New York upheld the charges for crimes against humanity of torture and arbitrary arrest and detention, and dismissed the charges against the defendants for extrajudicial killing and violations of the right to life, security and association. On appeal by both parties, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the Alien Tort Statute does not provide jurisdiction over claims for violations of international law committed by corporations and not individual persons. Accordingly, the suit against the defendants could not continue and all charges were dismissed.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court confirmed the Appeals Court's decision, but based it on the ground that Alien Tort Statute has no extraterritorial application and thus does not apply to events that happened outside the United States.