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Anthony Sawoniuk was born in what is now Belarus, and was a convicted Nazi collaborator who took part in the murder of Jews during WWII. Sawoniuk later moved to the United Kingdom where he became a British citizen, this is why the War Crimes Act could be applied to his case. In the UK Sawoniuk lived freely until his name was found on a KGB list of war criminals in 1993.

After being put on trial for war crimes (murder) against Jews in Domachevo, Sawoniuk was found guilty by a jury in the Old Bailey on two charges and sentenced to life in prison. Sawoniuk appealed this judgment, arguing that the trial contained errors in law, and was therefore not a fair trial. It was mostly asserted, for several reasons, that the two eyewitnesses that were the primary evidence for his conviction were not truthful, and hence that the trial was based on unreliable and insufficient evidence. However, on 10 February 2000, the Court dismissed his appeal, judging that sufficient measures were taken by the trial judge to ensure a fair trial. In 2005 Sawoniuk died while in prison.

The Chagos Archipelagos are a collection of small islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Under British administration since 1814, they were home to approximately 1000 inhabitants by the 1960s who lived on and cultivated the land, educated their children and raised their families.

In 1964, the British and the United States governments entered into secret negotiations the outcome of which was the establishment of a military base on Diego Garcia, the Chagos Archipelagos largest islands. In order to do so, from 1965 until 1971, the population of Chagos was forcibly relocated: those who had left on trips abroad were denied re-entry, an embargo was put in place preventing the delivery of crucial food supplies and the remaining population was forcibly loaded onto ships and relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles.

The present civil suit is brought by the indigenous peoples of Chagos, their survivors and their descendants against the United States and a number of high-ranking individuals within the US Government whom the plaintiffs consider responsible for their forcible relocation. By a decision of 21 December 2004, the District Court for the District of Columbia held that the case was not justiciable as it required the judiciary to review political questions. On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the decision of the lower court. 

Al Bahlul is a Yemeni national that has been imprisoned at the United States Detention Camp at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, since 2002. After over a decade of legal proceedings related to his role as a media and propaganda secretary in al Qaeda and his involvement in the 2000 Bombing of U.S.S. Cole and the 9/11 Attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, USA, the D.C. Circuit Court rejected his appeal for resentencing and upheld his life sentence.

While Al Bahlul’s legal team argued that the lower courts and the Military Commission failed to adequately reconsider his sentencing after his initial 2008 convictions were appealed and evidence of potential torture was introduced, the D.C. Circuit disagreed. It held that the CMCR adequately considered the appropriate sentence for the conspiracy conviction and that evidence on the grounds of torture was inadmissible because regulations on admissible evidence were stricter at the time of Bahlul’s original sentencing and he should have made that claim in the previous decade of appeals.

Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad Al Odah was captured in Afghanistan for his involvement with the Taliban. Since 2002, Al Odah has been detained at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay (Cuba). He filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus (a legal action allowing the detained person to challenge the legality of his detention) in May 2002. In 2008, the Supreme Court in the consolidated cases of Boumediene v. Bush and Al-Odah v. United States, considered that US federal courts have jurisdiction to hear petitions of habeas corpus. The District Court denied Al Odah’s petition on the grounds that the evidence adduced by the US Government was enough to permit his detention. 

Al Odah appealed the District Court’s judgment raising challenges with respect to the procedure admitting evidence as well as the sufficiency of evidence to support that he was part of the al Qaeda and Taliban forces.

The Court of Appeals dismissed both grounds of appeal since it did not find any errors either in the District Court’s procedure on admitting evidence or in the sufficiency of the evidence presented by the US Government. In this light, the Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of Al Odah’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

In September 2007, 14 Iraqi civilians were killed and 20 wounded by employees of Blackwater, a private security company hired by the US to protect its government employees. They stated that it was self-defence, but were charged with manslaughter.

They alleged they made statements under pressure (as they were threatened to be fired if they would not do so). Under US law, these statements are ‘compelled’ and can therefore not be used in criminal proceedings. As these statements appeared in the press, both the prosecution team and witnesses were influenced by them. Therefore, the Court ruled, the rights of the defendants have been inexcusably breached. It dismissed the charges against the defendants.

The Court of Appeals did not agree and stated that the District Court should have been more specific when it branded the evidence against the defendants as ‘tainted’. It held that, for example, witness statements should have been subjected to a part by part examination to determine which parts were tainted. These statements should not have been ‘thrown out’ entirely, according to the Court of Appeals.