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Indonesia had illegally occupied East Timor since 1975 despite the will of the Timorese to gain independence. The Indonesian Armed Forces, together with a number of militia groups, carried out a nationwide campaign intended to terrorise and punish independence supporters.

The Accused was the leader of the Sakunar militia group for the village of Bebo. In this capacity, he ordered the deaths of two suspected independence supporters and requested that the ear of the second victim be brought back to him as proof. He additionally participated in the beating of a third victim. He pleaded guilty to the charges of murder and other inhumane acts as a crime against humanity. The Court sentenced him to 7 years’ imprisonment finding him liable for failure to prevent his subordinates’ crimes, for ordering the commission of such crimes and for jointly committing one crime, the beating. 

Saša Radak was a member of a volunteer unit of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). The War Crimes Prosecutor alleged that, in the period between 20 and 21 November 1991, together with other volunteer and as a part of a shooting platoon, Radak has treated inhumanely and executed 192 of the Croatian POWs.

Even though verdicts against Radak were entered on two occasions (2006 and 2009) and he was sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment, the Supreme Court of Serbia overturned them both, in 2007 and 2013, respectively. This was due to the significant breaches of the criminal procedure and the verdicts being based on insufficiently verified factual evidences.

Abduladhim Maktouf is a businessman with Iraqi-Bosnian roots. After investigations had started in 2004 with regard to economic crimes, the Bosnian prosecution discovered that he might have been involved in war crimes committed by the Al Mujahid armed group that formed part of the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the armed conflict against the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), the army of the Bosnian Croats, during the early nineties. In 2005, an indictment was issued, alleging that Maktouf had facilitated the Al Mujahid by transporting them, while they were about to take a number of civilians as hostages in order to exchange them with the HVO for earlier captured Al Mujahid fighters, in his van towards the crime scene as well as assisting them in the actual hostage-taking and the subsequent ritual beheading of one of the hostages.

The first instance panel of the Court found that he had been guilty as accessory to the hostage-taking and sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment; his involvement in the beheading was not established, though. Both defence and prosecution appealed. After a partial retrial was ordered because the evidence was wrongly assessed in first instance, the Appellate Panel ruled on 4 April 2006 in the same manner as the first instance panel had done: Maktouf was found guilty of a war crime against civilians, and he again received a five-year prison sentence.

In the period of April 1992 until March 1993 a large-scale armed conflict was taking place in the Foča municipality. During this time Neđo Samardžić was a member of the army of the so-called Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As part of this army, Samardžić committed and helped commit killings, forced people to relocate, forced women into sexual slavery, held women in a specific camp where they were raped, and persecuted (Muslim) Bosniak civilians on national, religious, ethnical and gender grounds.

The Court dismissed Samardžić' complaints that he had had no opportunity to (sufficiently) cross-examine the witnesses, as it found that he had been sufficiently able to cross-examine the witnesses and test their reliability. On 7 April 2006 Samardžić was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to thirteen years and four months imprisonment.

The decision is the first of its kind in France to hold accountable the French State and the national railway company, the SNCF, for complicity in the deportation of Jewish individuals during World War II. The case was brought by the Lipietz family who sought damages for the prejudice they suffered as a result of being deported from the city of Pau in southern France to the internment camp at Drancy, near Paris in 1944. They argued that the State and the SNCF were responsible because their deportation was conducted with the assistance of the SNCF and with the approval of the Home Secretary.

The Administrative Tribunal of Toulouse held that both the French state and the SNCF were complicit in the deportation of the claimants, having committed egregious errors and were accordingly fined a total of 62,000 Euros.