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On 29 September 2016, Amin Mohamed was sentenced by an Australian court to 5,5 years’ imprisonment for attempting to travel to Syria and fight there. Mr. Mohamed, a New Zealander, was convicted by a jury in October 2016 for booking flights to Turkey, and receiving the contact details of a man who would assist him (and others) getting from Turkey to Syria with the intention of fighting in the ongoing armed conflict there. In this venture, Mr. Mohamed had been assisted by Hamdi Alqudsi, another man convicted earlier in 2016 for assisting seven would-be foreign fighters with travel to Syria. Mr. Mohamed was prevented from undertaking this travel in September 2013 due to the revocation of his passport and will likely face deportation to New Zealand at the end of his imprisonment.

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.

In the present decision, the Court of Appeal of The Hague confirmed the decision of the District Court of The Hague that the Dutch courts have no jurisdiction over the crime of genocide allegedly commited by the Accused. This does not, however, bar prosecution of the Accused for war crimes and torture. 

Under the authoritarian regime of Major General Barre in Somalia, the Somali Armed Forces perpetrated a number of human rights abuses against the Somali civilian population, in particular against members of the Isaaq clan.

The petitioners, all members of the Isaaq clan, allege that in the 1980s and 1990s they suffered ill-treatment at the hands of the Somali military including acts of rape, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention. They instituted a civil complaint against Mohamed Ali Samantar, the-then Minister of Defence and later Prime Minister of Somalia on the basis of the Torture Victims Protection Act.

The District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia dismissed the claim for lack of subject matter jurisdiction on the grounds that Samantar enjoys immunity from proceedings before courts of the United States by virtue of his function as a State official at the relevant time under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). The Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed this decision, arguing that the FSIA is not applicable to individuals, and even if it were, the individual in question would have to be a government official at the time of proceedings commencing against him.

By the present decision, the Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Court of Appeals: the FSIA is not applicable to individuals so Samantar does not enjoy immunity from the present proceedings by virtue of it. Consequently, proceedings against him can continue. 

On 19 February 2009, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH)’s Appellate Panel issued a second instance verdict in the case against Željko Lelek. In first instance, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity because, while performing the duties of a police officer in Višegrad, he committed unlawful imprisonment, torture and rapes, and participated in the forcible transfer of the population during a widespread and systematic attack directed by the Serb army, police and paramilitary forces against the Bosniak civilian population in the area of the Višegrad municipality in April-June 1992. The verdict was in large part upheld; the sentence, however, was increased in second instance from 13 to 16 years’ imprisonment, as the Appellate Panel attached greater weight to the aggravating circumstance of Lelek’s ruthlessness and insensitivity towards the victims.

This case revolved around three individuals who were working in prison camps during the armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia in 1992: Željko Mejakić, Chief of Security of Omarska Camp; Momčilo Gruban, leader of one of three guard shifts at Omarska camp;Dušan Fuštar, leader of one of three guard shifts in Keraterm camp; and Duško Kneževic, who held no official position at any of the camps, but who regularly entered the camps at will, assumedly in search of information about the person who had killed his brother during the war. All four men were initially indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia for charges of crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture and other inhumane acts. However, in 2006, they were transferred to Bosnia and Herzegovina to be tried there.

After the case was separated into two, Fuštar, in his own case, entered into a plea agreement with the prosecution and received a nine year sentence. The other three were still tried together. The Trial Panel found them guilty and sentenced Mejakić to 21 years’ imprisonment, Kneževic to 31 years and Gruban to eleven years. They appealed against their conviction; the Appellate Panel partly granted their appeal, but mostly for insignificant parts, leading to Mejakić’s and Kneževic’s conviction and sentence to be upheld. With regard to Gruban, however, the Appellate Panel found that the first instance verdict did not properly take into consideration the mitigating factors – namely, that Gruban had in several instances helped detained people in order to at least alleviate their suffering – and reduced his sentence to seven years.