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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.

Mikaeli Muhimana was the conseiller of Gishyita Sector in Kibuye Prefecture from 1990 through the genocide in 1994. On 28 April 2005, Trial Chamber III of the ICTR convicted Muhimana of genocide and crimes against humanity for instigating, committing, and abetting numerous crimes between April and June 1994 at various locations in Kibuye Prefecture. The Chamber sentenced him to life imprisonment.

By majority the Appeals Chamber allowed only two of Muhimana’s sixteen grounds of appeal challenging his convictions and sentence. The Appeals Chamber unanimously determined, however, that these errors did not invalidate any of Muhimana’s convictions and sentences for rape and murder given his numerous other crimes, including his role in five other killings and ten other rapes. The Appeals Chamber unanimously dismissed Muhimana’s remaining fourteen grounds of appeal. The Appeals Chamber confirmed the Accused’s convictions for genocide, rape and murder as crimes against humanity, as well as his sentence of imprisonment for the remainder of his life. 

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.