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Damir Ivanković was born on 26 June 1970 in Prijedor. In 1992, he was a member of the Prijedor police station and the police intervention platoon from Prijedor. He pleaded guilty of escorting a convoy consisting of at least 16 buses, tractor-trailers, trucks and truck-trailers carrying more than 1,200 predominantly Muslim and some Croat civilian, who were detained at the Bosnian Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp. Ivanković further admitted that when the convoy reached Mount Vlašić, he and other members of the police intervention platoon and the Prijedor police separated more than 200 men. They subsequently boarded them on two buses and brought them to a location called Korićanske stijene on Mount Vlašić, an area where there is a sheer rock face on one side of the road and a steep cliff on the other. There, Ivanković and the others ordered the men of the first bus to kneel on the very edge of the road above the cliff and subsequently fired at them. Some of the men jumped into the abyss hoping that they would survive. The men from the second bus were executed in groups of three. Thereafter, the accused threw hand grenades from the top of the precipice, and opened fire at the dead bodies and at those who jumped. In total, more than 200 men were killed and only 12 survived.

Ivanković was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Until July 1994, Michel B. was the managing director of OCIR-Tea, the controlling body for the tea industry in Rwanda. B. 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.

B. was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on charges of genocide and, in the alternative, war crimes. He pleaded guilty to complicity in genocide and he was sentenced to 8 years’ imprisonment. The Tribunal found that B. had substantially assisted the military and the Interahamwe militia launch an attack against Tutsis at Kesho Hill and Nyundo Cathedral by authorising that vehicles and fuel from his tea factories be used to transport attackers, that personnel from the factories participate in the attacks and that the attackers be provided with heavy weapons. These weapons were then stored in his factory. The Accused also contributed financially by providing the Interahamwe with money to purchase alcohol so as to motivate them to continue with killings. 

Between April and July 1994, as much as ten percent of the entire Rwandan civilian population (75 percent of all Tutsis) was murdered in an ethnic conflict in which the Hutus sought to eliminate the Tutsis. At the same time, an armed conflict was fought between the Rwandan government army (FAR) and the armed forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF were a rebel army primarily composed of descendants of Rwandan Tutsi who fled from Rwanda in preceding years.

The accused, Joseph Mpambara, fled Rwanda for the Netherlands. He was arrested and brought before the Dutch courts on charges of war crimes, torture and genocide. While the Dutch courts deemed themselves without jurisdiction for genocide, the District Court of The Hague did convict Mpambara for torture.

The Court of Appeal also convicted him for war crimes - inter alia for his participation in a massacre against thousands of refugees in a church - and increased his 20 years' prison sentence to life imprisonment.

In the ‘Context’ case, a large terrorism case in the Netherlands, nine individuals were found guilty of various terrorism offences, ranging from online incitement to the recruitment of individuals to travel to Syria. This case arose out of investigations into the flow of foreign fighters from the Netherlands – namely people heading to Syria in order to join various terrorist groups, including ISIS and al-Nusra. The prosecution successfully argued that an organisation existed in the Netherlands that aimed at recruiting other people to support terrorist groups in Syria and to travel to join the fighting. The case also looked into the use of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, and its role in recruiting individuals.

The nine accused, including several individuals who had travelled to Syria, faced charges concerning incitement to join terrorist groups, the dissemination of inciting materials, the recruitment of people to travel to Syria, the participation in training to commit terrorist crimes, participation in a criminal and terrorist organisation, and other charges relating to inciting hate and defamation. The defendants were all convicted of differing offences and their sentences ranged from seven days’ to six years’ imprisonment. 

In August 1998, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by terrorists loyal to Osama bin Laden. In retaliation, President Clinton ordered a missile strike on the El-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, arguing that it was a base for terrorism. Later, it was proven that the plant had no ties to terrorists. Therefore, El-Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries brought complaints against the United States in the US Court of Federal Claims.

In March 2003, the US Court of Federal Claims dismissed the complaints as non-justiciable based on the ‘political question doctrine’ (which foresees that courts have no authority to hear or adjudge on matters that raise political, rather than legal, questions).

In August 2004, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the decision of the Court of Federal Claims, finding that the complaints raised a non-justiciable political question. The Court reached this conclusion on the basis of the fact that the President is entrusted by the Constitution to render as enemy property the private property of an alien situated in a foreign country.