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Between April and July 1994, as much as 10% of the entire Rwandese civilian population was murdered in an ethnic conflict in which the Hutu sought to eliminate the Tutsi. At the same time, an armed conflict was fought between the Rwandese government army (FAR) and the armed forces of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF were a rebel army primarily composed of descendants of Rwandese Tutsi who fled from Rwanda in preceding years.

The Accused, Joseph Mpambara, fled Rwanda for The Netherlands. He was brought before the Dutch courts on charges of war crimes, torture and genocide. The present decision by the District Court of The Hague convicted the Accused of complicity in torture on two separate incidents. The first concerned the threatening of a German man, his Tutsi wife and their baby at a roadblock. The second concerned the mutilation and murder of a number of Tutsi women and their children who were stopped and forced outside from the ambulance in which they were being transported from one locality to another.

The Court was not able to convict the Accused for war crimes as it found that there wasn’t a sufficient link between the acts and the armed conflict in Rwanda. It was precluded from prosecuting the charges of genocide because the Dutch courts lacked jurisdiction. The Accused was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment.

Ahmad al-Y. was convicted of two crimes: the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity and participation in a terrorist organisation. The court holds that the accused fought alongside Ahrar al-Sham in the Syrian Civil War and considers this organisation to have terrorist intent. Therefore, the accused is convicted for participation in a terrorist organisation.

The court finds the accused also guilty of the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity. Al-Y. can be seen in a video alongside other fighters celebrating a battlefield victory around a deceased person and putting his foot on the body of the deceased person. This conduct, in combination with other acts of the accused in the video, is humiliating and degrading enough to meet the threshold of this crime. In another video, in which the accused is roughly interrogating a captured soldier, this threshold is not met.

Ahmad al-Y. is sentenced to a combined six years of imprisonment, which is a relatively low sentence due to mitigating circumstances.

Ahmad al-Y. was accused of two crimes: the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity and participation in a terrorist organisation. The court finds that the accused fought in Syria alongside the terrorist organisation Ahrar al-Sham and he is therefore convicted of participation in a terrorist organisation.

Unlike the Court of First Instance, the Court of Appeal does not find the suspect guilty of the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity. The videos show the accused spitting towards the deceased person and putting his foot near a body, while he was celebrating a victory over soldiers of the Syrian Government. Although the actions of him and his fellow fighters are disrespectful and distasteful, the court finds that this conduct does not meet the threshold necessary for this crime. The conduct is not degrading or humiliating enough. The victims are not severely suffering and are not displayed as a trophy.

The accused is sentenced to five years and four months of imprisonment, which is lower than usual, since the case took unreasonably long.

In 1994, an armed conflict between the Rwandese government forces and the Rwandese Patriotic Front and the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens in Rwanda and the elimination of approximately 75% of the Tutsi population.

Joseph Mpambara was a member of the interahamwe militia who fled Rwanda for Kenya and finally the Netherlands after 1994. He is charged with having murder, rape, kidnapping, hostage taking and torture against several Tutsi individuals including young children who were hacked with machetes after being forced out of an ambulance with their mother. Since the Accused is a non-Dutch national and the crimes with which he is charged did not occur on Dutch territory and did not implicate Dutch nationals in any way, the question of jurisdiction arose.

By a decision of 24 July 2007, the District Court of The Hague determined that it did not have jurisdiction to try the Accused for crimes of genocide as it lacked a statutory basis to do so. Further, it could not exercise indirect jurisdiction as one of the three criteria set out in the Dutch Penal Code was not met. 

Until July 1994, Michel Bagaragaza was the managing director of OCIR-Tea, the controlling body for the tea industry in Rwanda. Bagaragaza 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. Bagaragaza was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on charges of genocide, and in the alternative, war crimes. His case was referred to The Netherlands at the request of the Prosecutor of the ICTR.

However, a decision of the District Court of The Hague in a case against another Rwandan national, Joseph Mpambara, in which the Court held that the Dutch courts have no jurisdiction over genocide committed by non-Dutch nationals abroad prior to 2003, was released soon after Bagaragaza's surrender to The Netherlands. Fearing that the outcome would be the same and the case against him would not proceed in The Netherlands, the ICTR requested The Netherlands to surrender Bagaragaza back to the ICTR for prosecution. By a decision of 21 March 2008, the District Court of The Hague authorised the surrender.